Selective Involvement of PRC2 in Mouse Hypothalamus Cell Specification

Neuronal sub-type diversity in the hypothalamus is staggeringly immense. To investigate the role of epigenetic regulation in hypothalamic development in the generation of this cellular diversity; a floxed Eed allele was crossed to the early, pan-CNS Cre deleter Sox1-Cre, resulting in loss of H3K27me3 in the entire Mus musculus CNS by E11.5. The E18.5 embryonic hypothalamus was dissected and analysed by single cell RNA sequencing, on the Illimina/BioRad platform. Cell specification was surprisingly unaffected, with the majority of cell types - except Hcrt and dopamine neurons - sucessfully generated. This indicates that the role of the PRC2 complex - past E11.5 - is surprisingly limited in Mus musculus hypothalamic development. Control and mutant Eed conditional knock-out E18.5 embryos were analyzed by scRNA-seq in the hypothalamus.