The genesis of broad neuronal classes from multipotential neural progenitor cells has been extensively studied, but less is known about the diversification of a single neuronal class into multiple types. We used single-cell RNA-seq to study how newly-born (postmitotic) mouse retinal ganglion cell (RGC) precursors diversify into ~45 discrete types. Here we have provided a dataset of immature RGCs profiled at five time points: E13, E14, E16, P0, P5 using two cell-surface proteins Thy1/CD90 and L1cam. We have also included adult RGCs profiled at P56 which has also been uploaded as part of a previous study (SCP509). This allows users to survey gene expression changes in maturing RGCs across these six time points, as well as examine the transcriptomic diversity of RGC types at each of the six time points.

Six different clusterings of the data can be visualized. Six of these correspond to the individual time points, while one of them combines all time points: 

• P56 (45 types)
• P5 (38 clusters)
• P0 (27 clusters)
• E16 (19 clusters)
• E14 (12 clusters)
• E13 (10 clusters)

For E13-P5 above, WOT inferred fate associations can be visualized for each of the 45 terminal types. These correspond to the annotation labels ending in “_traj”. This allows us to identify precursors with the highest fate association with the terminal types.  

If this dataset is helpful to you, please consider citing:

Shekhar, K., Whitney, I.E., Butrus, S., Peng, Y.R. and Sanes, J.R.,  Diversification of multipotential postmitotic mouse retinal ganglion cell precursors into discrete types. bioRxiv, 2021