Temporal evolution of single-cell transcriptomes of Drosophila olfactory projection neurons

Abstract

Neurons undergo substantial morphological and functional changes during development to form precise synaptic connections and acquire specific physiological properties. What are the underlying transcriptomic bases? Here, we obtained the single-cell transcriptomes of Drosophila olfactory projection neurons (PNs) at four developmental stages. We decoded the identity of 21 transcriptomic clusters corresponding to 20 PN types and developed methods to match transcriptomic clusters representing the same PN type across development. We discovered that PN transcriptomes reflect unique biological processes unfolding at each stage—neurite growth and pruning during metamorphosis at an early pupal stage; peaked transcriptomic diversity during olfactory circuit assembly at mid-pupal stages; and neuronal signaling in adults. At early developmental stages, PN types with adjacent birth order share similar transcriptomes. Together, our work reveals principles of cellular diversity during brain development and provides a resource for future studies of neural development in PNs and other neuronal types.

Systematic expression profiling of dprs and DIPs reveals cell surface codes in Drosophila larval peripheral neurons

“…Thus, our dpr/DIP expression could serve as a map to identify individual MNs from a MN cluster in a larval VNC sample (Nguyen et al, 2021;Vicidomini et al, 2021). In addition to dprs and DIPs, other CSP subfamilies have been reported in several scRNAseq datasets, suggesting that expression maps of other subfamilies and even combinations of subfamilies can be utilized to refine cell types in datasets (Kurmangaliyev et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2021;Xie et al, 2021).…”

“…One method to deconvolve these large cell clusters is to sort cells before performing scRNAseq. For example, many labs have used the GAL4/UAS system to label and sort olfactory neurons (Li et al, 2020;McLaughlin et al, 2021;Xie et al, 2021), T cells in the fly visual system (Hörmann et al, 2020;Kurmangaliyev et al, 2020), eye-antennal discs cells (González-Blas et al, 2020) or NBs (Michki et al, 2021). On the other hand, researchers may also use the scRNAseq data to identify specific drivers, and then identify which neuron expresses this driver (Li, 2020).…”

A neural correlate of individual odor preference inDrosophila

“…To find a parameterization with those functions, we tuned the values of ai as scalar multipliers on ORN, eLN, iLN, and PN columns of the hemibrain connectivity matrix. Thus, these values represent cell type-specific sensitivities to presynaptic currents, which may be justified by the fact that ORNs/LNs/PNs are genetically distinct cell populations 71,72 . A small grid search of the four class-wise sensitivity parameters produced a configuration that reasonably satisfied the above criteria (Fig S14).…”

Classifying Drosophila olfactory projection neuron boutons by quantitative analysis of electron microscopic reconstruction

“…Recent transcriptome data ( Croset et al. 2018 ; Xie et al., 2021 ) and serial section electron microscopy (ssEM) results ( Butcher et al., 2012 ) suggest that PNs release neuropeptides as a neuromodulator at their axonal boutons, as well as two types of neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and γ-aminobutyric acid ( Yasuyama et al. 2002 ; Liang et al., 2013 ).…”