Comparative transcriptional analysis of the satellite glial cell injury response

The recent advance in single cell RNAseq technologies has enabled a new approach to investigate satellite glial cells (SGCs). Here we publish a dataset from mice subjected to sciatic nerve injury as well as a dataset from dorsal root ganglia cells after 3 days in culture. We use a meta-analysis approach to compare the injury response with that in other published datasets and conclude that SGCs share a common signature following sciatic nerve crush and sciatic ligation, involving transcriptional regulation of cholesterol biosynthesis. We also observed a considerable transcriptional change when culturing SGCs, suggesting that some differentiate into a specialised in vitro state, while others start resembling Schwann cell-like precursors. This study is a comparison of 3 scRNAseq datasets from mouse dorsal root ganglia with focus on SGCs. The Seurat objects of all datasets can be found here under supplementary files. The first dataset contains scRNAseq data from L3 and L4 dorsal root ganglia at 7 and 14 days after sciatic nerve injury (SNI) together with data from the naive conditon. This dataset is called Cell_SNI and can be found at GSE174430. The secound dataset contains data from L3-L5 dorsal root ganglia 3 days after a crush injury and from the naive condition. This dataset is called Cell_crush and can be found at GSE139103. Finally the third dataset contains cells from all dorsal root ganglia after 3 days in culture. This dataset is called Cell_culture and can be found here. The Cell_culture dataset contains two replicates (A+B) run on the same 10X chip.