Neural plate progenitors give rise to both anterior and posterior pituitary cells

The pituitary is the master neuroendocrine tissue, which regulates body homeostasis. It consists of the adenohypophysis (AH), which harbors hormones producing cells and the neurohypophysis (NH), which relays the direct passage of hormones from the brain to the periphery. We previously characterized the mouse NH cell identities (Chen Q et al., 2020). However, the zebrafish NH cell types remained unknown owning to surgical inaccessible and limited amount of the tissue. Using Mars-Seq single-cell sequencing (Jaitin et al., 2014), we characterized the cell types of the neurohypophyseal enriched population from the juvenile and adult zebrafish pituitaries, which laid the foundation for further lineage and functional research in this study. 3 pools of 37 days post fertilization, 5-month and 7-month old Tg(pomca:EGFP) zebrafish were prepared for Mars-seq single-cell RNA-Seq. Two 348-well plates were collected for each age group.