TY - JOUR T1 - Characterization of hormone-producing cell types in the teleost pituitary gland using single-cell RNA-seq JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2020.12.14.422690 SP - 2020.12.14.422690 AU - Khadeeja Siddique AU - Eirill Ager-Wick AU - Romain Fontaine AU - Finn-Arne Weltzien AU - Christiaan V. Henkel Y1 - 2020/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/12/15/2020.12.14.422690.abstract N2 - The pituitary is the vertebrate endocrine gland responsible for the production and secretion of several essential peptide hormones. These, in turn, control many aspects of an animal’s physiology and development, including growth, reproduction, homeostasis, metabolism and stress responses. In teleost fish, each hormone is presumably produced by a specific cell type. However, key details on the regulation of, and communication between these cell types remain to be resolved. We have therefore used single-cell sequencing to generate gene expression profiles for 2592 and 3804 individual cells from the pituitaries of female and male adult medaka (Oryzias latipes), respectively. Based on expression profile clustering, we define 15 and 16 distinct cell types in the female and male pituitary, respectively, of which ten are involved in the production of a single peptide hormone. Collectively, our data provide a high-quality reference for studies on pituitary biology and the regulation of hormone production, both in fish and in vertebrates in general.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -