The pig single cell landscape identifies heterogeneity of endothelial cells across major organs and tissues.

Pigs are valuable large animal models for biomedical and genetic research, but insights into the tissue- and cell-type-specific transcriptome and heterogeneity remain limited. A recently published article in Nature communications describes an international collaboration between Aarhus University (Denmark), the Human Protein Atlas at SciLifeLab (Sweden) and the Lars Bolund Institute for Regenerative Medicine at BGI (China), in which single-cell RNA sequencing is used to generate a multiple-organ single-cell transcriptomic map containing over 200,000 pig cells from 20 tissues and organs.

The study comprehensively characterizes the heterogeneity of cells in tissues and identify 234 cell clusters, representing 58 major cell types. In-depth integrative analysis of endothelial cells reveals a high degree of heterogeneity. Regulon analysis of single-cell transcriptome of microglia in pig and 12 other species further identifies an evolutionally conserved regulon in the microglia. The article describes the landscape of single-cell transcriptomes within diverse pig organs and identifies the heterogeneity of endothelial cells and evolutionally conserved regulon in microglia.

Link to article (Open access)