Single-cell transcriptomic atlas of the human endometrium during the menstrual cycle
- 14 September 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Medicine
- Vol. 26 (10), 1644-1653
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-1040-z
Abstract
In a human menstrual cycle the endometrium undergoes remodeling, shedding and regeneration, all of which are driven by substantial gene expression changes in the underlying cellular hierarchy. Despite its importance in human fertility and regenerative biology, our understanding of this unique type of tissue homeostasis remains rudimentary. We characterized the transcriptomic transformation of human endometrium at single-cell resolution across the menstrual cycle, resolving cellular heterogeneity in multiple dimensions. We profiled the behavior of seven endometrial cell types, including a previously uncharacterized ciliated cell type, during four major phases of endometrial transformation, and found characteristic signatures for each cell type and phase. We discovered that the human window of implantation opens with an abrupt and discontinuous transcriptomic activation in the epithelia, accompanied with a widespread decidualization feature in the stromal fibroblasts. Our study provides a high-resolution molecular and cellular characterization of human endometrial transformation across the menstrual cycle, providing insights into this essential physiological process.Keywords
This publication has 56 references indexed in Scilit:
- STAR: ultrafast universal RNA-seq alignerBioinformatics, 2012
- Dynamic Regulation of Wnt7a Expression in the Primate Endometrium: Implications for Postmenstrual Regeneration and Secretory TransformationEndocrinology, 2012
- The evolution of menstruation: A new model for genetic assimilationBioEssays, 2011
- Information transmission in genetic regulatory networks: a reviewJournal of Physics: Condensed Matter, 2011
- Foxa2 Is Essential for Mouse Endometrial Gland Development and Fertility1Biology of Reproduction, 2010
- Endometrial Decidualization: Of Mice and MenSeminars in Reproductive Medicine, 2010
- Modeling menstrual cycle length using a mixture distributionBiostatistics, 2005
- Luminal and Glandular Endometrial Epithelium Express Integrins Differentially Throughout the Menstrual Cycle: Implications for Implantation, Contraception, and InfertilityAmerican Journal of Reproductive Immunology, 1996
- Principal CurvesJournal of the American Statistical Association, 1989
- On a Test of Whether one of Two Random Variables is Stochastically Larger than the OtherThe Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 1947