Single-cell transcriptomics of theDrosophilawing disc reveals instructive epithelium-to-myoblast interactions

Abstract

In both vertebrates and invertebrates, generating a functional appendage requires interactions between ectoderm-derived epithelia and mesoderm-derived cells. To investigate such interactions, we used single-cell transcriptomics to generate a cell atlas of the Drosophila wing disc at two time points during development. Using these data, we investigate gene expression using a multi-layered model of the wing disc and catalogued ligand-receptor pairs that could mediate signaling between epithelial cells and adult muscle precursors (AMPs). We found that localized expression of the FGF ligands, Thisbe and Pyramus, in the disc epithelium regulates the number and location of the AMPs. In addition, Hedgehog ligand from the epithelium activates a specific transcriptional program within adjacent AMP cells, which is critical for proper formation of a subset of the direct flight muscles. More generally, our annotated atlas provides a global view of potential cell-cell interactions between subpopulations of epithelial and myogenic cells.

scvi-tools: a library for deep probabilistic analysis of single-cell omics data

“…To demonstrate this capability, we applied scVI to a dataset of Drosophila wing disc myoblast cells [63] that suffered from strong effects due to cell cycle and sex of the donor organism, both of which were observed via a set of nuisance genes (i.e., numerical covariates; Supplementary Table 2). Both of these confounding factors are observed at the cell-level, as these cells were taken from batches of fly larva and were processed together without sex sorting.…”

Transcriptomic exploration of the Coleopteran wings reveals insight into the evolution of novel structures associated with the beetle elytron

“…A few possibilities exist to explain these patterns; (i) similar genes are spatially differentially regulated at this time to produce downstream changes, yet their overall level of expression remains the same; thus, making them invisible to differential expression-based analyses, or (ii) upstream (early to mid-level) patterning events are similar and, instead, changes in morphology have been achieved through modifications at the terminal realizator genes. Deciphering these possibilities may require additional seq-based approaches over larger developmental periods in combination with more intricate histological and functional dissections (such as single-cell RNAseq; Deng et al, 2019;Everetts et al, 2021).…”