Single-cell transcriptomics of female fetal mouse ovarian cells

In mammal, female reproductive health is largely related to fetal ovarian development, along with tight coordination of transcriptional and metabolic regulations, as well as cell-cell communications. Mice is an ideal modal for the understanding of network mechanism in this process, thus providing essential information on the diagnosis and therapy of female reproductive diseases, as well as on oogenesis in vitro. To plot the landscape of mouse fetal ovarian development, STRT-seq was applied for ovarian cells isolated from E11.5 to E18.5 female gonads using Blimp1-mVenus and Stella-ECFP (BVSC) mice. Based on the expression patterns of well-known marker genes, 9 germ cell clusters and 8 somatic cell clusters were annotated, presenting a continuous distribution across fetal ovarian development. To summarize, we constructed a systematic cell-fate transition of mouse female fetal ovarian cells at single-cell resolution, including stage-specifically activated TFs, cellular metabolism pathway, and cell–cell communication network in ovarian microenvironment. A single cell transcriptome profile of mouse ovarian cells from E11.5 to E18.5 were generated by next generation sequencing using Illumina HiSeq X-Ten.