Margaret Schroeder

Wow, so fun to think back to that! Thank you so much, Ed, for all your help along the way!

A new cross-species atlas created by Yang Tan researchers reveals how astrocytes—star-shaped cells and the brain’s most abundant non-neuronal cells—change across space and time. This resource gives scientists an essential lens for probing brain development, function, and disease.

GitHub - Feng-Lab-MIT/AstrocyteHeterogeneity: scripts for analysing snRNAseq, FISH, and ExR data accompanying Schroeder et al., 2025 scripts for analysing snRNAseq, FISH, and ExR data accompanying Schroeder et al., 2025 - Feng-Lab-MIT/AstrocyteHeterogeneity

Code on GitHub (github.com/Feng-Lab-MIT...) and images on BossDB (bossdb.org/project/schr...).

Raw data (fastqs, h5 count matrices) on NeMO (data.nemoarchive.org/biccn/grant/...) and GEO (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/ac...).

Processed data on the Broad Institute Single Cell Portal, searchable and interactive: singlecell.broadinstitute.org/single_cell/... (mouse) and singlecell.broadinstitute.org/single_cell/... (marmoset).

Though we focused our analysis on astrocytes, we did not sort or select for any particular cell type in our prep. Our dataset is a rich, publicly available resource containing all neural cell types - please explore via the links below, and feel free to reach out with any questions!

We then virally labeled astrocytes with GFP and used expansion microscopy to visualize their detailed morphology (it was so fun to take these images!). We quantified their morphological differences across regions in mouse.

Looking across species, we found broad conservation of cell types. However, several marmoset cell types appeared more mature than their mouse counterparts at birth, and the gene expression signatures underlying astrocyte regional heterogeneity diverged significantly between mouse and marmoset.

As others had shown, we found that astrocytic regional heterogeneity is patterned embryonically. What we were surprised to find was just how much regional astrocyte gene expression signatures change over postnatal development, likely in support of local neuronal circuits.

To answer this question, we profiled millions of single nuclei with 10x Genomics snRNAseq across brain regions (motor and prefrontal cortices, striatum, and thalamus) and developmental time (from late embryonic to aged time points) in mouse and marmoset.

What started out as an exploration of astrocyte regional heterogeneity in the young adult marmoset led us to ask, how early in development is astrocyte regional heterogeneity patterned, and how does it change over developmental time and across mammalian species?

A transcriptomic atlas of astrocyte heterogeneity across space and time in mouse and marmoset In this NeuroResource, Schroeder et al. present a transcriptomic atlas across brain regions and developmental time points in mouse and marmoset. Detailed analysis focused on astrocytes revealed that t...

I’m so excited to share my first-author PhD paper, out today in Neuron as a NeuroResource! A huge thanks to all of my co-authors, and of course to my wonderful mentors Guoping Feng, @fennak.bsky.social and @eboyden3.bsky.social. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Very excited to share multiExR!