Modular organization of mouse prefrontal cortex subnetwork revealed by spatial single-cell multi-omic analysis of SPIEDER-Seq

Deciphering the connectome, transcriptome and spatial-omics integrated multi-modal brain atlas and the underlying organization principles remains a great challenge. We developed a cost-effective Single-cell Projectome-transcriptome In situ Deciphering Sequencing (SPIDER-Seq) technique by combining viral barcoding tracing with single-cell sequencing and spatial-omics. This empowers us to delineate a comprehensive integrated single-cell spatial molecular, cellular and projectomic atlas of mouse prefrontal cortex (PFC). The projectomic and transcriptomic cell clusters display distinct modular organization principles, but are coordinately configured in the PFC. The projection neurons gradiently occupied different territories in the PFC aligning with their wiring patterns. Importantly, they show higher co-projection probability to the downstream nuclei with reciprocal circuit connections. Moreover, we integrated projectomic atlas with their distinct spectrum of neurotransmitter/neuropeptide and the receptors-related gene profiles and depicted PFC neural signal transmission network. By which, we uncovered potential mechanisms underlying the complexity and specificity of neural transmission. Finally, we predicted neuron projections with high accuracy by combining gene profiles and spatial information via machine learning. This study facilitates our understanding of brain multi-modal network and neural computation. We injected rAAV2-retro viruses with different barcodes into multiple target brain areas of the prefrontal cortex of c57bl/6 mice. One months later, the prefrontal cortex of the mice was dissected and the cells were sorted for BD Rhapsody scRNAseq. A total of 3 mice were included in this study.