Deciphering Endoderm-derived Macrophage-like Metaphocytes in Zebrafish Gill and Intestine

In order to have a comprehensive understanding of endoderm derived mpeg1+ cells in zebrafish gill and intestine, we isolated endoderm-derived GFP+ cells and remaining DsRedx+ cells (hematopoiesis-derived macrophages) from the gill (sox17_gill_GFP, sox17_gill_DsRedx) and intestine (sox17_intestine_GFP, sox17_intestine_DsRedx) of 4-OHT treated Tg(sox17:CreERT2;mpeg1:loxP-DsRedx-loxP-GFP) fish and performed RNA-seq. Both T-SNE analysis and feature gene comparison indicate that the endoderm-derived mpeg1+ cells in the gill and intestine are highly similar to the metaphocytes in the epidermis. We hence also refer to these endoderm-derived mpeg1+ cells as metaphocytes. Different cell types form zebrafish gill and intestine, including GFP labelled metaphocytes and DsRedx labelled macrophages, were sorted by fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). cDNA libraries were prepared according to standard Smart-seq2 protocol. Three duplicated samples for each cell type were sent to Novogene for Illumina Hiseq X Ten 150 bp pair-end sequencing.