Fig. 5

Estimating sex differences in pituitary cell types by leveraging single-nuclei RNA-seq. A Schematic of analysis workflow for estimating sex differences in pituitary cell types using bulk gene expression with single-nuclei RNA-seq data from [16]. B Estimated cell-type proportions by RNA-seq deconvolution using Proportions in Admixture (WGCNA) changes across profiled ages of cell types with previously established sex-biased proportions in the adult pituitary. Estimated cell-type proportions are plotted across postnatal ages along the x-axis. Large circles and triangles represent the mean cell-type proportion at each age and small circles and triangles represent each biological replicate. Lighter color, solid line, circle points: female samples; dark color, dotted line, triangle points: male samples. Wilcoxon test was performed to compare cell proportions between both sexes at each age (*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01). See Additional file 1: Fig. S6D for all other pituitary cell type proportions. C Heatmap of cell-weighted fold-changes (cwFC) for sex-biased genes at PD37 in somatotropes, lactotropes, and gonadotropes. Color gradient indicates gene-normalized cwFC value calculated by scMappR; red: more female-biased; blue: more male-biased. Genes with |gene-normalized cwFC|> 0.5 in at least one cell type are plotted. Genes shown to be sex-biased in the same direction in the same cell-type by [14] are indicated by the purple text and an asterisk within the cell of the corresponding cell-type