A common framework for mouse hypothalamic cell atlases

Abstract

An explosion of recent work has harnessed the power of single-cell biology to reveal the transcriptomic diversity of cell types in the mouse hypothalamus. Steuernagel, Lam and co-authors present HypoMap, a comprehensive single-cell transcriptomic atlas of the mouse hypothalamus.

Fig. 1 ∣. Generation of a reference atlas of mouse hypothalamic cell type diversity.

Seventeen published and publicly available scRNA-seq datasets were used, representing both whole hypothalamus samples and dissection of specific hypothalamic subregions (including the preoptic area, suprachiasmatic nucleus, arcuate nucleus, ventromedial nucleus, lateral hypothalamic area and mammillary bodies). In addition, the authors generated their own snRNA-seq dataset from the whole hypothalamus (with fed versus fasted conditions). Following library preparation, sequencing and quality control, the profiles of 384,925 single cells and nuclei were integrated into a unified reference atlas of hypothalamic cell populations (HypoMap). Single-cell data are represented as a uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) and are used for dimensionality reduction and data visualization. Clusters are colour-coded, representing transcriptionally distinct neuronal and non-neuronal cell populations (UMAP image reproduced from ref. , Springer Nature Limited).