ArticleBiology2026
Single-Cell Transcriptomic Analysis Reveals Early Transcriptional Heterogeneity of Cardiac-Associated Cell Populations During Zebrafish Embryogenesis.
Article in Biology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Understanding the development and differentiation of cardiac progenitor cells during the initial stages of embryogenesis is central to a complete understanding of vertebrate heart development. In zebrafish, cardiac specification begins during gastrulation; however, the single-cell transcriptional dynamics of initial cardiac lineage commitment remain not fully defined. In this case, we integrated single-cell RNA sequencing datasets of zebrafish embryos at 4 and 6 h post-fertilisation (hpf) to investigate early cardiac lineage specification. The unsupervised clustering of the integrated dataset identified 12 distinct cell clusters, which made it possible to identify a transcriptionally distinct population of cells characterised by the coordinated expression of transcription factors associated with cardiac development. A further subclustering of the cells expressing cardiac-associated transcription factors showed a significant level of early diversification of the cardiac progenitor group. A projection onto low-dimensional embedding revealed a structured transcriptional organisation of the cardiac subclusters, marked by the differential expression of key cardiac transcription factors, including Gata5, Gata6, Hand2, Nkx2.5, and Tbx5a. A pseudotemporal trajectory analysis uncovered a continuous developmental progression within the cardiac lineage and indicated the gene-specific dynamic regulation and temporal hierarchy of cardiac transcriptional programs. Collectively, these results indicate that zebrafish cardiac progenitors are transcriptionally diverse and acquire cardiac fate through a sustained, continuous regulatory process rather than an abrupt fate transition. This work provides an informative, high-resolution model of early cardiac lineage specification and highlights the power of single-cell transcriptomics for analysing dynamic events in vertebrate embryogenesis.
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