Cell types and clonal relations in the mouse brain revealed by single-cell and spatial transcriptomics

Summary

The mammalian brain contains a large number of specialized cells that develop from a thin sheet of neuroepithelial progenitor cells^1,2. Recently, high throughput single-cell technologies have been used to define the molecular diversity of hundreds of cell types in the nervous system^3,4. However, the lineage relationships between mature brain cells and progenitor cells are not well understood, because transcriptomic studies do not allow insights into clonal relationships and classical fate-mapping techniques are not scalable^5,6. Here we show in vivo barcoding of early progenitor cells that enables simultaneous profiling of cell phenotypes and clonal relations in the mouse brain using single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. We reconstructed thousands of clones to uncover the existence of fate-restricted progenitor cells in the mouse hippocampal neuroepithelium and show that microglia are derived from few primitive myeloid precursors that massively expand to generate widely dispersed progeny. By coupling spatial transcriptomics with clonal barcoding, we disentangle migration patterns of clonally related cells in densely labelled tissue sections. Compared to classical fate mapping, our approach enables high-throughput dense reconstruction of cell phenotypes and clonal relations at the single-cell and tissue level in individual animals and provides an integrated approach for understanding tissue architecture.