Transcriptional analysis of anole lungs at E18

This project aims to establish the embryonic anole lung as a model for investigating lung development and more general epithelial morphogenesis by generating a set of single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) data from late-stage embryonic lungs taken from brown anoles (Anolis sagrei). The anole lung, with its simple architecture, provides a novel tool for investigating signaling in a less complex respiratory system than the murine lung, and this data set would be a large advance in making this system more widely known and accesible among developmental biologists. Lungs were dissected from anole embryos at embryonic day 18 and dissociated in dispase. Cells were processed in the 10x Genomics Chromium system. The tissues we isolated contain all expected cell types of embryonic lungs, including mesenchymal cells at each stage of differentiation into smooth muscle.