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Updated: Jul 24, 2025
An Experimental System to Study Mechanotransduction in Fetal Lung Cells
Published on: February 16, 2012
Single-cell transcriptome analysis reveals cellular heterogeneity and highlights Fstl1-regulated alveolar
Si Zhang1, Xiuxue Mo2, Yueyue Jin1
1College of Life Sciences, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Protein Sciences, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China.
Abstract:
The matricellular protein, follistatin-like 1 (FSTL1), regulates lung development and saccular formation. Here, we employed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to construct a transcriptomic atlas of 22,774 individual cells from wild-type (WT) and Fstl1-/- lung (E18.5) samples and identified 27 cell subtypes. We observed abnormal population sizes and gene expression profiles in diverse cell subtypes in Fstl1-/- lung samples. We identified Pdgfra and Tgfbi as genetic markers specifically expressed in postnatal myofibroblasts (MyoFBs). Fstl1 deletion decreased the number of MyoFB cells and downregulated their roles in ECM organization and muscle tissue/vasculature development, partly through the TGF-β1/BMP4 signaling pathway. Our data provide a single-cell view of the cellular heterogeneity and the molecular mechanisms underlying abnormal saccular formation and atelectatic lungs in Fstl1-/- mice.
