SINGLE-CELL TRANSCRIPT PROFILING OF CELLULAR HETEROGENEITY IN TISSUE REGENERATION

Abstract

The process of tissue regeneration is multifaceted biological process which is controlled by dynamic cellular interactions and heterogenous populations of cells. Conventional bulk transcriptomic methods do not reveal the finer nuances of the diversity of individual cells in regeneration processes. The application of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) in this work is used to examine the heterogeneity of cells during tissue regeneration at a high level. Highly expressive cell populations and transcriptional signatures are defined by computational clustering and dimensionality reduction approaches. The pseudotime trajectory analysis is used to recapitulate the lineage progression and predict developmental transitions between regenerative cell types. Moreover, the functional enrichment analysis demonstrates the most important signaling pathways, including Wnt, Notch, and TGF-B, which control cell fate choices and tissue regeneration processes. The findings reveal that the transcriptional variation between the cell populations is dramatic and therefore reflects the importance of infrequent progenitor-like cells in repair. The work offers more insight into the mechanisms of tissue regeneration, both molecular and cellular, and appears to be a framework of how regenerative medicine research can be conducted in the future.