Global transcriptional profiles of abdominal skin dermis during perinatal period

We report global transcriptional alteration and transcriptional heterogeneity of dermal cells in remodeling mouse abdominal skin during perinatal period. By single cell RNA sequencing of whole dermal cells isolated from the abdominal skin dermis of non-pregnant (NP) mice, pregnant mice at dpc16, and post-partum mice at dpp42 by using Col1a2creERT2;R26H2B-EGFP mice. By unsupervised evaluation of clustering-based cell identities of total samples on the Seurat platform, we identified 13 main clusters. The second round of unsupervised clustering of each cluster revealed that the vascular cluster exhibits dynamic transcriptome alteration during pregnancy. Overall design: We treated the mice with tamoxifen during pregnancy and harvested abdominal skin at dpc16 and dpp42. For the control, abdominal skin was harvested from non-pregnant (NP) mice treated with tamoxifen for 3 days and harvested at 48 days after treatment. After dissociation of the dermis into single cells, we generated chromium single cell 3' v2 libraries from randomly captured dermal cells and sequenced them using Illumina NextSeq500. We profiled 6,020 cells (NP: 1,289cells; Dpc16: 3,650cells; Dpp42: 1,081cells) with a range of 4,500–5,400 mean reads per cell for each sample, whereby approximately 1,200–1,500 median genes per cell for each sample were detected.