Loupe files for six Visium v1 spatial transcriptomic sections of fetal human hearts at 8.4 (male) and 9.7 (female) post-conceptional weeks

Congenital heart defects are collectively frequent and a significant burden for human health. Understanding the developmental origins of such anomalies in the first and longest-lived vital organ is key to improving diagnoses, prognoses and therapies. However, although the atlas of human cardiac cells before birth continues to benefit from increased sampling and technological and analytic advances, equivalencies across different investigators’ datasets or with animal models remain tenuous. We have determined the individual transcriptomes of nearly fifty thousand human heart cells from three fetuses between post-conceptional weeks (pcw) 8-11, and enriched annotations of these cells with a spatial transcriptomics analysis of six slices from two additional stage-matched fetuses. Integrations across modalities, sex and time points both internally and with earlier atlases have revealed the existence of previously unidentified, transient contractile, conductive and stromal cell types and their likely lineage relationships during the first trimester. Further analyses in dozens of other heart specimens at varying levels of spatiotemporal resolution enabled us to validate characteristics of cardiac cells across a wide range of cell population sizes and ages. Our updated multi-modal atlas advances knowledge about cell-autonomous states and adds precision to the repertory of contextual tissular and positional influences that are exerted by and on the diverse lineages of the developing human heart during a critical time window.<br>If you reuse any part of this dataset, we request that you respect the CC BY license by crediting the original publication on bioRxiv or in its published form.