Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of adult mouse pituitary reveals sexual dimorphism and physiologic demand-induced cellular plasticity.

Single-cell transcriptomic analysis of adult mouse pituitary reveals sexual dimorphism and physiologic demand-induced cellular plasticity. Protein Cell. 2020 Mar 19;: Authors: Ho Y, Hu P, Peel MT, Chen S, Camara PG, Epstein DJ, Wu H, Liebhaber SA Abstract The anterior pituitary gland drives highly conserved physiologic processes in mammalian species. These hormonally controlled processes are central to somatic growth, pubertal transformation, fertility, lactation, and metabolism. Current cellular models of mammalian anteiror pituitary, largely built on candidate gene based immuno-histochemical and mRNA analyses, suggest that each of the seven hormones synthesized by the pituitary is produced by a specific and exclusive cell lineage. However, emerging evidence suggests more complex relationship between hormone specificity and cell plasticity. Here we have applied massively parallel single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), in conjunction with complementary imaging-based single-cell analyses of mRNAs and proteins, to systematically map both cell-type diversity and functional state heterogeneity in adult male and female mouse pituitaries at single-cell resolution and in the context of major physiologic demands. These quantitative single-cell analyses reveal sex-specific cell-type composition under normal pituitary homeostasis, identify an array of cells associated with complex complements of hormone-enrichment, and undercover non-horm...
Source: Protein and Cell - Category: Cytology Tags: Protein Cell Source Type: research