Shangtao Cao, Huijian Feng, Hongyan Yi, Mengjie Pan, Lihui Lin, Yao Santo Zhang, Ziyu Feng, Weifang Liang, Baomei Cai, Qi Li, Zhi Xiong, Qingmei Shen, Minjing Ke, Xing Zhao, Huilin Chen, Qina He, Mingwei Min, Quanyou Cai, He Liu, Jie Wang, Duanqing Pei, Jiekai Chen, Yanlin Ma
The lung is the primary respiratory organ in human, in which the proximal airway and the distal alveoli are responsible for air conduction and gas exchange, respectively. However, the regulation of proximal-distal patterning at the embryonic stage of human lung development is largely unknown. Here we investigated the early lung development of human embryos at weeks 4-8 post fertilization (Carnegie stages 12-21) using single-cell RNA sequencing, and obtained a transcriptomic atlas of 169,686 cells. We observed discernible gene expression patterns of proximal and distal epithelia at week 4, upon the initiation of lung organogenesis...
April 21, 2023: Cell Research