Temporal evolution of single-cell transcriptomes of Drosophila olfactory projection neurons
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University, United States
- Stanford University, United States
- Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, United States
Abstract
Neurons undergo substantial morphological and functional changes during development to form precise synaptic connections and acquire specific physiological properties. What are the underlying transcriptomic bases? Here, we obtained the single-cell transcriptomes of Drosophila olfactory projection neurons (PNs) at four developmental stages. We decoded the identity of 21 transcriptomic clusters corresponding to 20 PN types and developed methods to match transcriptomic clusters representing the same PN type across development. We discovered that PN transcriptomes reflect unique biological processes unfolding at each stage—neurite growth and pruning during metamorphosis at an early pupal stage; peaked transcriptomic diversity during olfactory circuit assembly at mid-pupal stages; and neuronal signaling in adults. At early developmental stages, PN types with adjacent birth order share similar transcriptomes. Together, our work reveals principles of cellular diversity during brain development and provides a resource for future studies of neural development in PNs and other neuronal types.
Data availability
Raw sequencing reads and preprocessed sequence data have been deposited in GEO under accession code GSE161228.
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Temporal evolution of single-cell transcriptomes of Drosophila olfactory projection neuronsNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE161228.
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Classifying Drosophila Olfactory Projection Neuron Subtypes by Single-cell RNA SequencingNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE100058.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01 DC005982)
- Liqun Luo
National Institutes of Health (1K99AG062746)
- Hongjie Li
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Liqun Luo
Stanford University (Graduate Student Fellowship)
- Qijing Xie
Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute at Stanford (Interdisciplinary postdoctoral scholar)
- Hongjie Li
We Tsai Neuroscience Institute at Stanford (Neuro-omics program)
- Liqun Luo
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Hugo J Bellen, Baylor College of Medicine, United States
Publication history
- Received: September 25, 2020
- Accepted: January 5, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: January 11, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: February 8, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Xie et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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