An integrated single-cell transcriptome landscape of postnatal mouse hypothalamus

Abstract

The neural stem cells (NSCs) in the hypothalamus are relatively more narrowly defined than in other neurogenic regions of the postnatal brain. By leveraging single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data, we generated an integrated reference dataset comprising 296,282 cells from postnatal hypothalamic regions and the adjacent region, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), and identified 30 hypothalamic neuronal and non-neuronal cell populations. The analyses of their gene expression pattern, and specific differentiation trajectories reveal the presence of NSCs and intermediate progenitor cells (IPCs) that show a continuum of activation and differentiation processes in the hypothalamus after birth. Through comparative analyses of the integrated dataset with our lab-generated Connect-seq data obtained from the whole hypothalamus, we further assessed the technical validity of the dataset presented in this study. Our large-scale unified scRNA-seq dataset with harmonized cell-level metadata can serve as a valuable resource for investigating cell type-specific gene expression and cellular differentiation trajectories in the postnatal mouse hypothalamus.