Journal: bioRxiv
Article Title: Intermittent parathyroid hormone employs autonomous and non-autonomous mechanisms to drive osteogenesis from Ebf3-expressing skeletal progenitor cells
doi: 10.64898/2026.05.21.726951
Figure Lengend Snippet: (A) Harmony-integrated UMAP of single cell RNA-sequencing data from FACS-isolated CD45–Ter119–tdTomato+ cells labeled by Ebf3-CreERT2 following 10 days of iPTH, OPG-Fc, combination or vehicle treatment (Vehicle = 1,155 cells, PTH = 1,638 cells, OPG-Fc = 1,720, and OPG-Fc + PTH = 1,773; n = 5-6 mice/group). Inset shows feature plot of tdTomato mRNA expression across clusters. ( B ) Violin plots showing mRNA expression levels of CAR cell, pre-osteoblast, and mature osteoblast marker genes in Ebf3-lineage cell clusters. ( C ) Volcano plots showing the total number of significant differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of all Ebf3-lineage CAR subclusters regulated by PTH, OPG-Fc, or OPG-Fc + PTH (adjusted P-value < 0.05 and |log2FC| > 0.5). ( D ) PTH-responsive module scores visualized by Feature plots of each Ebf3-lineage CAR cell and pre-osteoblast (top) and violin plots (bottom) across Ebf3-lineage CAR and osteoblast clusters in response to iPTH, OPG-Fc, combination, or vehicle treatment. ( E ) Violin plots showing the expression levels of canonical PTH target genes and CAR cell fate regulating transcription factor genes across Ebf3-lineage CAR and pre-osteoblast clusters in response to iPTH, OPG-Fc, combination, or vehicle treatment. ( F ) Venn-diagrams comparing differentially expressed genes altered by PTH versus OPG-Fc + PTH treatment. ( G ) Gene set enrichment analysis of all significantly up- and down-regulated DEGs by PTH but not OPG-Fc + PTH in Ebf3-lineage CAR clusters using the MSigDB Hallmark 2020 database. The top 5 significantly enriched gene sets are shown (adjusted P-value < 0.05). ( H ) Violin plots showing the expression levels of TGFß-responsive genes across Ebf3-lineage CAR and pre-osteoblast clusters in response to iPTH, OPG-Fc, combination, or vehicle treatment. ( I ) TGFß-responsive module scores visualized by Feature plots of each Ebf3-lineage CAR cell and pre-osteoblast (top) and violin plots (bottom) across Ebf3-lineage CAR and osteoblast clusters in response to iPTH, OPG-Fc, combination, or vehicle treatment. Cliff’s delta (δ) = non-parametric effect size used to measure differences between module score distributions. Differential gene expression between treatment and control cells, and treatment interactions within each cluster was assessed using the MAST hurdle model. Black asterisks (*) denotes genes that are significantly differentially expressed in current dataset (adjusted P-value < 0.05 and |log2FC| > 0.5). Red asterisks indicate genes that were significantly regulated by iPTH in the single cell RNA-sequencing dataset from , but did not reach statistical significance in the current experiment, likely due to limited power. Blue hashtags (#) indicates a significant antagonistic treatment interaction between OPG-Fc and PTH. ( J ) Representative confocal images of immunohistochemical staining for phospho-SMAD2/3 in proximal tibia tissue sections from Ebf3-CreERT2; Rosa26-LSL-tdTomato; Bglap-GFP mice following 10 days of iPTH, OPG-Fc, combination or vehicle treatment. Red = Ebf3-CreERT2-tdTomato; green = Bglap-GFP; white = phospho-SMAD2/3; blue = DAPI. Scale bar = 50 µm.
Article Snippet: For FACS isolation of mouse tdTomato+ stromal cells for single cell RNA-sequencing experiments, mouse bone single cell suspension collected after 7 rounds of serial enzymatic digestion underwent magnetic activated cell depletion of hematopoietic cells using mouse lineage depletion kit (Miltenyi Biotec, 130-110-470) combined with CD45 microbeads (Miltenyi Biotec, 130-052-301) according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Techniques: Single Cell, RNA Sequencing, Isolation, Labeling, Expressing, Marker, Gene Expression, Control, Immunohistochemical staining, Staining