Fig. 2
Fetal age does not determine developmental stage of human germ cells. a Unsupervised hierarchical clustering of single female human germ cells, and the associated gene expression heatmap of germline-specific genes, combining our dataset with female cells from Guo et al., 2015 yielded a total of 129 female germ cells and 26 female somatic cells from 9 different donors (D). The germ cells segregated into categories representing 3 different developmental stages, instead of segregating by donor or fetal age. The categories represent the transcriptional signatures of primordial germ cells (PGC), late germ cells (LGC) and meiotic germ cells (MGC). b, c Multidimensional scaling plots showing the individual somatic cells and germ cells (our dataset combined with that of Guo et al., 2015) color-coded by developmental stage (PGC, LGC, MGC) (b) and by donors of different fetal age (weeks) (c). d Individual germ cells (our dataset combined with that of Guo et al., 2015) ranked by their respective gene expression profiles using Monocle. This ranking is largely consistent with the independently identified developmental stages. Cells are colored according to the fetal age and developmental stage (PGC, LGC, MGC)
