PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Federico Scala
AU  - Dmitry Kobak
AU  - Matteo Bernabucci
AU  - Yves Bernaerts
AU  - Cathryn René Cadwell
AU  - Jesus Ramon Castro
AU  - Leonard Hartmanis
AU  - Xiaolong Jiang
AU  - Sophie Laturnus
AU  - Elanine Miranda
AU  - Shalaka Mulherkar
AU  - Zheng Huan Tan
AU  - Zizhen Yao
AU  - Hongkui Zeng
AU  - Rickard Sandberg
AU  - Philipp Berens
AU  - Andreas Savas Tolias
TI  - Phenotypic variation within and across transcriptomic cell types in mouse motor cortex
AID  - 10.1101/2020.02.03.929158
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.02.03.929158
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/04/2020.02.03.929158.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/04/2020.02.03.929158.full
AB  - Cortical neurons exhibit astounding diversity in gene expression as well as in morphological and electrophysiological properties. Most existing neural taxonomies are based on either transcriptomic or morpho-electric criteria, as it has been technically challenging to study both aspects of neuronal diversity in the same set of cells. Here we used Patch-seq to combine patch-clamp recording, biocytin staining, and single-cell RNA sequencing of over 1300 neurons in adult mouse motor cortex, providing a comprehensive morpho-electric annotation of almost all transcriptomically defined neural cell types. We found that, although broad families of transcriptomic types (Vip, Pvalb, Sst, etc.) had distinct and essentially non-overlapping morpho-electric phenotypes, individual transcriptomic types within the same family were not well-separated in the morpho-electric space. Instead, there was a continuum of variability in morphology and electrophysiology, with neighbouring transcriptomic cell types showing similar morpho-electric features, often without clear boundaries between them. Our results suggest that neural types in the neocortex do not always form discrete entities. Instead, neurons follow a hierarchy consisting of distinct non-overlapping branches at the level of families, but can form continuous and correlated transcriptomic and morpho-electrical landscapes within families.