ABSTRACT
The diversity of neural stem cells is a hallmark of the cerebral cortex development in gyrencephalic mammals, such as Primates and Carnivora. Among them, ferrets are a good model for mechanistic studies. However, information on their neural progenitor cells (NPC), termed radial glia (RG), is limited. Here, we surveyed the temporal series of single-cell transcriptomes of progenitors regarding ferret corticogenesis and, found a conserved diversity and temporal trajectory between human and ferret NPC, despite the large timescale difference. We found truncated RG (tRG) in ferret cortical development, a progenitor subtype previously described in humans. The combination of in silico and in vivo analyses identified that tRG differentiate into both ependymal and astrogenic cells. Via transcriptomic comparison, we predict that this is also the case in humans. Our findings suggest that tRG plays a role in the formation of adult ventricles, thereby providing the architectural bases for brain expansion.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
This revised manuscript includes a description about an improvement of gene models of ferrets with new Figure 1 which were put in a supplementary figure. We also added some additional explanations in the legends of Figures describing the prediction of tRG subtypes in humans and oRG in ferrets by comparison between them (new Fig. 6 and 7).
https://github.com/wuquan723/Ferret-single-cell-data-from-Matsuzaki-lab
