The continuum of Drosophila embryonic development at single-cell resolution

Science. 2022 Aug 5;377(6606):eabn5800. doi: 10.1126/science.abn5800. Epub 2022 Aug 5.

Abstract

Drosophila melanogaster is a powerful, long-standing model for metazoan development and gene regulation. We profiled chromatin accessibility in almost 1 million and gene expression in half a million nuclei from overlapping windows spanning the entirety of embryogenesis. Leveraging developmental asynchronicity within embryo collections, we applied deep neural networks to infer the age of each nucleus, resulting in continuous, multimodal views of molecular and cellular transitions in absolute time. We identify cell lineages; infer their developmental relationships; and link dynamic changes in enhancer usage, transcription factor (TF) expression, and the accessibility of TFs' cognate motifs. With these data, the dynamics of enhancer usage and gene expression can be explored within and across lineages at the scale of minutes, including for precise transitions like zygotic genome activation.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Cell Lineage / genetics
  • Drosophila Proteins* / genetics
  • Drosophila Proteins* / metabolism
  • Drosophila melanogaster* / cytology
  • Drosophila melanogaster* / embryology
  • Drosophila melanogaster* / genetics
  • Embryonic Development* / genetics
  • Enhancer Elements, Genetic
  • Gene Expression Regulation, Developmental*
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Single-Cell Analysis

Substances

  • Drosophila Proteins