Whole-body integration of gene expression and single-cell morphology

Abstract

Animal bodies are composed of hundreds of cell types that differ in location, morphology, cytoarchitecture, and physiology. This is reflected by cell type-specific transcription factors and downstream effector genes implementing functional specialisation. Here, we establish and explore the link between cell type-specific gene expression and subcellular morphology for the entire body of the marine annelid Platynereis dumerilii. For this, we registered a whole-body cellular expression atlas to a high-resolution electron microscopy dataset, automatically segmented all cell somata and nuclei, and clustered the cells according to gene expression or morphological parameters. We show that collective gene expression most efficiently identifies spatially coherent groups of cells that match anatomical boundaries, which indicates that combinations of regionally expressed transcription factors specify tissue identity. We provide an integrated browser as a Fiji plugin to readily explore, analyse and visualise multimodal datasets with remote on-demand access to all available datasets.