Deciphering the spatio-temporal transcriptional and chromatin accessibility of human retinal organoid development at the single cell level

Abstract

Molecular information on the early stages of human retinal development remains scarce due to limitations in obtaining early human eye samples. Pluripotent stem cell-derived retinal organoids provide an unprecedented opportunity for studying early retinogenesis. Using a combination of single cell RNA-Seq and spatial transcriptomics we present for the first-time a single cell spatio-temporal transcriptome of retinal organoid development. Our data demonstrate that retinal organoids recapitulate key events of retinogenesis including optic vesicle/cup formation, formation of a putative ciliary margin zone, emergence of retinal progenitor cells and their orderly differentiation to retinal neurons. Combining the scRNA-with scATAC-Seq data, we were able to reveal cell-type specific transcription factor binding motifs on accessible chromatin at each stage of organoid development and to show that chromatin accessibility is highly correlated to the developing human retina, but with some differences in the temporal emergence and abundance of some of the retinal neurons.