Fig. 1

Overview of the pituitary transcriptome during postnatal development in male and female samples. A Schematic of experimental design. Marks (purple) on the timeline denote the age in which the pituitary gland was collected. Vertical arrows denote average ages for onset of puberty of the specified sex in our colony (determined by preputial separation for males or vaginal opening for females). Fraction of pubertal mice out of total mice for males (blue) and females (red) at each age is shown. B Schematic of analysis workflow. Summary of miRNA expression analyses (yellow), gene expression analyses (blue), miRNA–gene target identification (green), processing of single-nuclei RNA-seq (snRNA-seq) data from [16] (red), and combining snRNA-seq data with bulk gene expression data (purple). C Genome browser screenshots showing QuantSeq signal at Fshb and Prop1. X-axis: genomic coordinates; y-axis: reads per million mapped reads (RPM); PD postnatal day. Gene name and gene model are shown on the bottom of each panel. Each track represents overlapping signal from 5–6 biological replicates. D Scatter plot showing the correlation between gene quantification measured by qPCR and by 3’UTR-seq in one pituitary sample (PD37M4). X-axis: ΔCt values obtained by qPCR; y-axis: log2-transformed normalized counts (log2(normCounts)) values obtained by 3’UTR-seq. Sample name, Spearman correlation coefficient, and number of genes included are labeled on the plot. PCA plot for pituitary gland samples based on E gene expression and F miRNA expression. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed using log2(normCounts) after filtering for low-count genes/miRNAs and normalization using RUVSeq. Only scores of the first 2 PCs are shown. Age is indicated by shape while sex is indicated by colors