Emergence of neuronal diversity during vertebrate brain development
Bushra Raj, Jeffrey A Farrell, Jialin Liu, Jakob El Kholtei, Adam N Carte, Joaquin Navajas Acedo, Lucia Y Du, Aaron McKenna, Dorde Relic, Jessica M Leslie, Alexander F Schier
Neurogenesis comprises many highly regulated processes including proliferation, differentiation, and maturation. However, the transcriptional landscapes underlying brain development are poorly characterized.
This work describes a developmental single-cell catalog of ~220,000 zebrafish brain cells encompassing 12 stages from embryo to larva, characterizing approximately 800 clusters with known and novel gene markers tracking neuronal and progenitor diversification across developmental timepoints.
Most embryonic neural progenitor states are transitory and transcriptionally distinct from neural progenitors of post-embryonic stages. The research reconstructs cell specification trajectories revealing late-stage retinal neural progenitors transcriptionally overlap cell states observed in the embryo.
An optimized GESTALT lineage recorder enabled enhanced expression and recovery of Cas9-edited barcodes for lineage segregation analysis.