When exploring the epigenetic landscape, it’s easy to get lost in the jungle of cell types. Thankfully, some exciting new preprints now bring forth much needed single-nucleus atlases to guide your voyage of the mouse brain.
We’re no strangers to cunning cartography that has emerged from the lab of Joe Ecker (Salk Institute, California). They’ve brought us the first genome-wide, single CpG resolution maps of the mammalian genome, landmark DNA methylation maps of the developing human and mouse brain, as well as human body methylome maps.
More recently, Chongyuan Luo from the Ecker lab, who just started his own lab at UCLA, developed single-nucleus methylcytosine sequencing (snmC-seq). Since then, we’ve seen single-nucleus multi-comics approaches, where the labs of Joe Ecker and Bing Ren (University of California, San Diego) developed single-nucleus methyl-3C sequencing (sn-m3c-seq) and sc-Methyl-HiC, respectively.
Now, a neuroepigenomic dream team comprised of the Ecker and Ren labs gives us companion preprints with some much needed single-nucleus atlases of the mouse brain that makes use of the improved snmC-seq2 method alongside single nucleus ATAC-seq (snATAC-seq). So make your way over to these preprints via tweets from the head map maker himself:
And, if the above isn’t enough to quench your thirst for single neuron methylomes, check out the recent Epi-Retro-Seq preprint, which combines retrograde tracing with snmC-seq2.