Enhancer-driven cell type comparison reveals similarities between the mammalian and bird pallium
Posted on: 2 July 2024 , updated on: 3 July 2024
Preprint posted on 18 April 2024
Pioneering multi-omics and deep learning models of the chicken brain shed light on amniote evolution.
Selected by Rodrigo Senovilla-GanzoCategories: bioinformatics, evolutionary biology, genetics, genomics, neuroscience
- Why I chose this preprint:
For me, there were two main reasons to select this preprint: Firstly, because it is one of the first atlases of chicken pallium, together with the ones presented in the simultaneously published preprints of Zaremba et al., (2024) et al. and Rueda-Alaña et al., (2024). The multi-omic atlas presented in the preprint highlighted here increases our knowledge of the avian taxa, sharpening the debate surrounding amniote pallium evolution and neuron type homologies. Secondly, and not less importantly, this preprint pioneers the use of deep learning and scATAC-seq methods to allow inter-species comparisons at the cell type level. These tools may become an incredible resource for the community of computational evolutionary biologists. Altogether, disruptive science and method development in one preprint, how not to highlight it?
- Background:
Although the mammalian and avian brains both display high cognitive functions (Güntürkün & Bugnyar, 2016) and share common structures such as the telencephalon (Puelles et al., 2013), their subdivision, circuitry and functionalization have evolutionary diverged (Medina et al., 2021).
In both taxa, the telencephalon is divided in a dorsal telencephalon or pallium, and ventral telencephalon or subpallium. The mammalian pallium is mainly composed of the highly-specialized, layered neocortex. However, there are other pallial structures such as the amygdala, hippocampus, olfactory cortex, among others (Molnár et al., 2014). Meanwhile, the avian pallium is not layered, but organised in nuclei. Most of the avian pallium is formed by the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR) (subdivided in mesopallium, nidopallium, entopallium and arcopallium), but there are also other important nuclei like the hyperpallium and the medial pallium (Reiner, 2005).
Establishing homologue cell types in the amniote pallium has been an arduous task. Some authors have claimed that homology is indicated by shared developmental fields (Puelles et al., 2017; Tosches et al., 2018; Colquitt et al., 2021), while others considered that shared adult gene expression and connectomics (Briscoe & Ragsdale, 2018; Stacho et al., 2020). The atlas and inter-species comparisons in this preprint add a new perspective based on enhancers and cutting-edge deep learning models.
- Key findings:
Innovative approaches for computing cell type similarities.
In the preprint, Hecker,Kempynck and colleagues combined four approaches for computing cell type similarities: (i) transcriptome comparison, (ii) predictions from sequence-based deep learning models, (iii) correlations of derived nucleotide contribution scores, and (iv) similarities of transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) motifs.
For the transcriptome similarity analysis (i), the authors employed established methods such as SAMap and gene correlation. Comparisons at the sequence level (scATAC-seq) were carried out by a new deep learning tool (ii). A model was trained for each species studied (human, mouse and chicken) and used to compare or map the cell types to other species. This powerful tool was able to reproduce the transcriptomic results, even when it was only trained on the data from other species.
This method was complemented with nucleotide contribution scores (iii), gradient based contribution scores and scores derived from in silico mutagenesis, which were confirmed by in vitro mutagenesis experiments. These experiments showed that mutagenesis of enhancers present in mouse could modify the enhancer activity of a mouse microglia cell line.
Lastly, a pipeline of different tools (TF-MoDISco, MEME suite, cisTarget) allowed the research team to extract group motifs from cell type specific differentially accessible regions (DARs). The correlation of these motifs’ presence also confirmed the ability to compute cell type similarities among the included species.
Multi-omic atlas of the chicken brain
This preprint presents one of the first atlases of the chicken pallium. The authors managed to annotate general cell types based on gene expression and further confirmed their identity through spatial Stereo-seq. The general non-neuronal cell types existing in mammals are also present in chicken: one-to-one pairs could be established in the comparisons. Similarly, GABAergic neurons (both pallial and striatal) also matched their likely homologue between avian and mammalian cell types. Nonetheless, scATAC-seq data seemed to cluster VIP and LAMP5, as well as SST and PVALB interneurons together in pairs. On the other hand, amniote equivalencies were not straightforward for glutamatergic neurons.
Conservation of amniote cell types
The main result of this study is the high conservation of general cell types despite the high evolutionary distance of amniote species. Non-neuronal, glutamatergic and GABAergic neuronal classes could be identified as homologous cell types by the four complementary computational methods described in the preprint. However, there is no such conservation among the subtypes of these different cell types.
The authors report a high conservation of the non-neuronal cell types. However, as there is no further sub-clustering, it was difficult to assess the conservation of their subtypes. In the case of GABAergic neurons, subtypes were shown to be highly conserved using the four methods, but the VIP/LAMP5 and SST/PVALB pairs were indistinguishable with the sequence-based approaches. Thus, there must be a shared regulatory machinery between these cell types, which is conserved in amniotes.
Among all cell types, it proved to be most difficult to find homologies for glutamatergic neurons. Despite the similarities among glutamatergic cells – as a general cell type – across amniotes, their subtypes display low similarity, especially compared to GABAergic neurons’ scores. The most robust similarities were found for medial pallium and mesopallium. On the one hand, the medial pallium clusters showed high transcriptomic and sequence-level cell type similarity with all methods used in this study, showing a high conservation of hippocampal cells between mammals and birds. On the other hand, the mesopallium clusters seemed to be similar to deep layers of neocortex, which was highly surprising. If confirmed, this similarity would require a new model to explain avian evolution.
Bibliography.
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Butler, A. B., Reiner, A., & Karten, H. J. (2011). Evolution of the amniote pallium and the origins of mammalian neocortex. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1225(1), 14. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1749-6632.2011.06006.X
Colquitt, B. M., Merullo, D. P., Konopka, G., Roberts, T. F., & Brainard, M. S. (2021). Cellular transcriptomics reveals evolutionary identities of songbird vocal circuits. Science, 371(6530). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd9704
Gedman, G., Haase, B., Durieux, G., Biegler, M. T., Fedrigo, O., & Jarvis, E. D. (2021). As above, so below: Whole transcriptome profiling demonstrates strong molecular similarities between avian dorsal and ventral pallial subdivisions. The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 529(12), 3222–3246. https://doi.org/10.1002/CNE.25159
Güntürkün, O., & Bugnyar, T. (2016). Cognition without Cortex. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(4), 291–303. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.TICS.2016.02.001
Medina, L., Abellán, A., & Desfilis, E. (2021). Evolving Views on the Pallium. Brain Behavior and Evolution, 96(4–6), 181–199. https://doi.org/10.1159/000519260
Molnár, Z., Kaas, J. H., De Carlos, J. A., Hevner, R. F., Lein, E., & Němec, P. (2014). Evolution and development of the mammalian cerebral cortex. Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 83(2), 126. https://doi.org/10.1159/000357753
Puelles, L., Harrison, M., Paxinos, G., & Watson, C. (2013). A developmental ontology for the mammalian brain based on the prosomeric model. Trends in Neurosciences, 36(10), 570–578. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2013.06.004
Puelles, L., Sandoval, J. E., Ayad, A., del Corral, R., Alonso, A., Ferran, J. L., & Martínez-de-la-Torre, M. (2017). The Pallium in Reptiles and Birds in the Light of the Updated Tetrapartite Pallium Model. Evolution of Nervous Systems, 1–4, 519–555. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-804042-3.00014-2
Reiner, A. (2005). A new avian brain nomenclature: why, how and what. Brain Research Bulletin, 66(4–6), 317–331. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.BRAINRESBULL.2005.05.007
Rueda-Alaña, E., Senovilla-Ganzo, R., Grillo, M., Vázquez, E., Marco-Salas, S., Gallego-Flores, T., Ftara, A., Escobar, L., Benguría, A., Quintas-Gorozarri, A., Dopazo, A., Rábano, M., dM Vivanco, M., María Aransay, A., Garrigos, D., Toval, Á., Luis Ferrán, J., Nilsson, M., Manuel Encinas, J., … García-Moreno, F. (2024). Evolutionary convergence of sensory circuits in the pallium of amniotes. BioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.30.591819
Song, Y., Miao, Z., Brazma, A., & Papatheodorou, I. (2023). Benchmarking strategies for cross-species integration of single-cell RNA sequencing data. Nature Communications 2023 14:1, 14(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41855-w
Stacho, M., Herold, C., Rook, N., Wagner, H., Axer, M., Amunts, K., & Güntürkün, O. (2020). A cortex-like canonical circuit in the avian forebrain. Science (New York, N.Y.), 369(6511). https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIENCE.ABC5534
Tosches, M. A., Yamawaki, T. M., Naumann, R. K., Jacobi, A. A., Tushev, G., & Laurent, G. (2018). Evolution of pallium, hippocampus, and cortical cell types revealed by single-cell transcriptomics in reptiles. Science, 360(6391), 881–888. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar4237
Zaremba, B., Fallahshahroudi, A., Schneider, C., Schmidt, J., Sarropoulos, I., Leushkin, E., Berki, B., Poucke, E. Van, Jensen, P., Senovilla-Ganzo, R., Hervas-Sotomayor, F., Trost, N., Lamanna, F., Sepp, M., García-Moreno, F., & Kaessmann, H. (2024). Developmental origins and evolution of pallial cell types and structures in birds. BioRxiv, 2024.04.30.591857. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.30.591857
doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/prelights.37750
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