Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals cellular and molecular heterogeneity in fibrocartilaginous enthesis formation
Abstract
The attachment site of the rotator cuff (RC) is a classic fibrocartilaginous enthesis, which is the junction between bone and tendon with typical characteristics of a fibrocartilage transition zone. Enthesis development has historically been studied with lineage tracing of individual genes selected a priori, which does not allow for the determination of single-cell landscapes yielding mature cell types and tissues. Here, in together with open source GSE182997 datasets (3 sample) provided by Fang et al, we applied Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to delineate the comprehensive postnatal RC enthesis growth and the temporal atlas from as early as postnatal day 1 up to postnatal week 8. And we furtherly performed single cell spatial transcriptomic sequencing on postnatal day 1 mice enthesis, in order to deconvoluted bone-tendon junction (BTJ) chondrocytes onto spatial spots. In summary, we deciphered the cellular heterogeneity and the molecular dynamics during fibrocartilage differentiation. Combined with current spatial transcriptomic data, our results provide a transcriptional resource that will support future investigations of enthesis development at the mechanistic level and may shed light on the strategies for enhanced RC healing outcomes.
Data availability
All single-cell datasets created during this study are publicly available at the Gene Expression Omnibus (GSE223751). Any additional information required to re-analyze the data in the paper is available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Single-cell RNA-seq of the tendon enthesis cellsNCBI Gene Expression Omnibus, GSE182997.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China (82230085)
- Hongbin Lu
National Natural Science Foundation of China (82272572)
- Hongbin Lu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All animal experimental protocols were approved by the Animal Ethics Committee of Central South University (No. 2022020058).
Copyright
© 2023, Zhang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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