Accession PRJCA003249
Title Single-cell Transcriptomics Identifies Divergent Developmental Lineage Trajectories during Human Pituitary Development
Relevance Medical
Data types Transcriptome or Gene expression
Organisms Homo sapiens
Description The anterior pituitary gland plays central roles in body growth, reproduction, metabolism and the stress response. In this study, we performed single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) of 4,113 individual cells from human fetal pituitaries. We characterized divergent developmental trajectories with distinct transitional intermediate states in five hormone-producing cell lineages. Corticotropes exhibit an early intermediate state prior to full differentiation. Three cell types of the PIT-1 lineage (somatotropes, lactotropes and thyrotropes) segregate from a common progenitor coexpressing lineage-specific transcription factors of different sublineages. Gonadotropes experience two multistep developmental trajectories. Interestingly, a fetal gonadotrope cell subtype expressing the primate-specific hormone chorionic gonadotropin was identified. We also characterized the cellular heterogeneity of pituitary stem cells and identified a hybrid epithelial/mesenchymal state and an early-to-late state transition. Here, our results provide key insights into the transcriptional landscape of human pituitary development, defining distinct cell substates and subtypes and illustrating transcription factor dynamics during cell fate commitment. The gene expression matrix and cell information were deposited in ftp://download.big.ac.cn/gsa/CRA003091/other_files/.
Sample scope Single cell
Release date 2020-09-16
Publication
PubMed ID Article title Journal name DOI Year
33077725 Single-cell transcriptomics identifies divergent developmental lineage trajectories during human pituitary development Nature Communications 10.1038/s41467-020-19012-4 2020
Grants
Agency program Grant ID Grant title
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (MOST) National Key Technologies R&D Program 2018YFC1003100 Research and development of new techniques for preimplantation genetic diagnosis
National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Major Research Plan 31871457 Single-cell transcriptome and epigenome analyses of human pituitary development
External link
External link Link description
https://tanglab.shinyapps.io/Human_Fetal_Pituitary_Endocrine_Cells/ Gene expression patterns of the endocrine cells
Submitter Fuchou Tang (tangfuchou@pku.edu.cn)
Organization Peking University
Submission date 2020-08-14

Project Data

Resource name Description
BioSample (96)  show -
GSA (1) -
CRA003091 Single-cell Transcriptomics Identifies Divergent Developmental Lineage Trajectories during Human Pituitary Development