Dear Community,
I’m looking for quantitative estimates on sizes of nuclei of neurons (including subtypes) and glia in human brain. I haven’t found a comprehensive study of this in the literature and was wondering if the human MTG snRNAseq dataset could be used to get estimates on relative sizes of neuronal/glia nuclei based on total number of nuclear RNA reads. Any idea if it’s feasible to, if not, quantify precisely the cell types by their nuclei sizes to at least rank them by such estimates?
Thank you!
Human MTG nuclei were index sorted by FACS, and we summarized FACS metadata by MTG cluster in Extended Data Figure 1b of our recent paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1506-7/figures/7. Forward-scatter area (FSC-A) is a rough proxy for nuclear size and shows significant cell type variability. Clusters with higher average FSC-A also tend to have more genes detected, consistent with there being more transcripts in larger nuclei. In situ measurements will be needed to confirm these cell type differences, but these data should provide a reasonable starting point.
Cheers,
Trygve
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Trygve, thank you so much - fantastic answer!
This publication has so much useful knowledge and insight - I am reading/rereading it and am discovering so much new stuff. Thank you and all your colleagues very much for amazing work!
Dear Trygve,
Where can I find the FSC-A number for each cell or the averages per cluster as reported in the Extended Data Fig 1b? I couldn’t find it in the SI.
Thank you very much for your help!
Here are FACS metadata for 571 indexed nuclei that were used to generate the figure:
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