Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals dynamic process and novel markers in porcine spermatogenesis

Purpose: To understand the overall transcriptional profile changes in porcine spermatogenesis. We firstly profiled single cell RNA-seq to shed light on transcriptional changes in spermatogenesis of porcine testis. The scRNA-seq analysis revealed spermatogonia, spermatocytes, spermatids and three somatic cell types in porcine testes. The functional enrichment analysis manifested these cell types played a diverse role in porcine spermatogenesis. The accuracy of the defined porcine germ cell types was further validated by comparing analysis of data from bulk RNA-seq and scRNA-seq. Four subsets of spermatogonia were revealed and two novel cell surface markers were identified, which would be helpful to characterize spermatogonial differentiation in pigs, probably also in the other farm animals.