Identification and characterization of innate lymphoid cells generated from pluripotent stem cells.

Innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) play important roles in regulating tissue homeostasis and innate immune responses. Generation of ILCs after engraftment of pluripotent stem cell (PSC)-derived hematopoietic progenitors (iHPCs) has not yet been reported. Here, we document that ILCs exist in Rag2-/-Il2rg-/- recipients engrafted with PSC-derived iHPCs guided by Runx1 and Hoxa9 expression. Upon transplantation, iHPCs immediately give rise to ILC-related progenitors containing common helper ILC progenitors in the bone marrow, followed by a more restricted population named ILC progenitors, which are able to further differentiate into mature ILCs in the primary and secondary immunodeficient recipients. The PSC-derived ILCs exhibit multiple tissue distributions and normal immunological functions. Single-cell transcriptomics illustrates the developmental trajectory of PSC-derived ILCs in vivo, which is consistent with that of natural ILCs. Our study provides insights into the generation of ILCs in animals transplanted with PSC-derived iHPCs as a cell source.

SAGD: a comprehensive sex-associated gene database from transcriptomes.

Many animal species present sex differences. Sex-associated genes (SAGs), which have female-biased or male-biased expression, have major influences on the remarkable sex differences in important traits such as growth, reproduction, disease resistance and behaviors. However, the SAGs resulting in the vast majority of phenotypic sex differences are still unknown. To provide a useful resource for the functional study of SAGs, we manually curated public RNA-seq datasets with paired female and male biological replicates from the same condition and systematically re-analyzed the datasets using standardized methods. We identified 27,793 female-biased SAGs and 64,043 male-biased SAGs from 2,828 samples of 21 species, including human, chimpanzee, macaque, mouse, rat, cow, horse, chicken, zebrafish, seven fly species and five worm species. All these data were cataloged into SAGD, a user-friendly database of SAGs (http://bioinfo.life.hust.edu.cn/SAGD) where users can browse SAGs by gene, species, drug and dataset. In SAGD, the expression, annotation, targeting drugs, homologs, ontology and related RNA-seq datasets of SAGs are provided to help researchers to explore their functions and potential applications in agriculture and human health.