Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals dynamic process and novel markers in porcine spermatogenesis. Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals dynamic process and novel markers in porcine spermatogenesis

Purpose: To understand the overall transcriptional profile changes in porcine spermatogenesis. Overall design: We firstly profiled single cell RNA-seq to shed light on transcriptional changes in spermatogenesis of porcine testis. The scRNA-seq analysis revealed spermatogonia, spermatocytes, spermatids and three somatic cell types in porcine testes. The functional enrichment analysis manifested these cell types played a diverse role in porcine spermatogenesis. The accuracy of the defined porcine germ cell types was further validated by comparing analysis of data from bulk RNA-seq and scRNA-seq. Four subsets of spermatogonia were revealed and two novel cell surface markers were identified, which would be helpful to characterize spermatogonial differentiation in pigs, probably also in the other farm animals.

研究目的：解析猪精子发生过程中的整体转录组谱变化。
整体实验设计：本研究首先通过单细胞RNA测序（single cell RNA-seq, scRNA-seq）技术，揭示猪睾丸精子发生过程中的转录组变化。单细胞RNA测序分析鉴定出猪睾丸内的精原细胞、精母细胞、精子细胞以及三种体细胞类型。功能富集分析表明，上述细胞类型在猪精子发生过程中发挥着多样化的功能。通过对比批量RNA测序（bulk RNA-seq）与单细胞RNA测序的数据，本研究进一步验证了所定义的猪生殖细胞类型的准确性。此外，本研究还鉴定出四个精原细胞亚群与两个全新的细胞表面标志物，这将有助于解析猪的精原细胞分化过程，或许也可为其他农场动物的相关研究提供参考。