Integrative single-cell transcriptomics clarifies adult neurogenesis and macroglia evolution

The evolution of nervous systems hinges on cell type diversification and specialization. Neural glia, also called macroglia, make up a large percentage of the total cell numbers in the brain of several species including humans and perform critical functions related to producing, maintaining and assiting neurons. Despite their importance, glial cells have been much less studied than neurons. Here, in order to investigate the heterogeneity of adult radial glial cells in zebrafish and to study the evolution of macroglia and the adult neurogenesis process they support, we generated a single cell RNAseq dataset of the adult zebrafish telencephalon enriched for radial glial cells using a sox2:gfp transgenic line. Overall design: Cells from the telencephalon of 12wpf Tg(sox2:gfp/+) fish were isolated by Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting (FACS). GFP positive cells were enriched to increase the relative proportion of radial glial cells and the resulting samples were processed for scRNA-seq.