BBE Division Seminar - Junhyong Kim

"Beyond single cells: Subcellular sequencing reveals
mosaic evolution of the dendritic transcriptome in rodent neurons"

Single cell biology has seen exponential advances in measurement technologies and throughput capacities. The ability to measure individual cell's molecular state has led to high resolution surveys of cellular diversity both within an organism, and through comparative studies, across the complex dynamics of cell state evolution. Here, we describe our work extending the resolution of assays to the dendritic subcellular compartment of mouse and rat neurons. Through micro-dissection of the neurite of individual neurons, we established a robust catalog of dendritically localized mRNA that contribute to activity-dependent local translation. Surprisingly, we found the dendritic transcriptomes to be more divergent between rats and mice than the soma of the neurons. While the identity of the localized mRNA seem to be relatively rapidly changing, we found functional roles of the genes to be relatively conserved, suggesting a model of mosaic evolution at the level of sub-cellular compartments with divergence mediated by system-level drift.

Faculty Host: Lior Pachter