ASTROGLIAL DIVERSITY ACROSS SPECIES USING SINGLE-CELL AND SPATIAL OMICS

Astroglia represent a highly diverse class of glial cells that play central roles in maintaining brain homeostasis, regulating synaptic activity, and supporting neuronal function. Despite their importance, the extent to which astroglial diversity is conserved across species remains incompletely understood, limiting our ability to define evolutionarily preserved principles of brain organization. To address this, we performed a comparative in silico analysis of astroglial populations using publicly available single-cell and spatial transcriptomics datasets, with a particular emphasis on the Allen Brain Atlas. Our analysis was restricted to healthy adult brain samples to avoid confounding pathological effects. We developed computational pipelines that encompassed quality control, dataset integration, and clustering strategies, thereby enabling direct comparisons of astroglial subpopulations across species. Dimensionality reduction analyses (UMAP) revealed regionally specialized transcriptional signatures, indicating functional diversification of astroglia across brain areas in zebrafish, mouse and human brains. Within the forebrain, preliminary results identified conserved molecular features among human, mouse, and zebrafish astroglia, supporting the hypothesis that core astroglial subdivisions are evolutionarily maintained. Interestingly, our findings also suggest species-specific transcriptional adaptations that may underlie the divergent neurobiological traits. Ongoing work aims to expand this comparative framework by incorporating additional astroglial subtypes and including further species in the cross-species analysis. Overall, this study provides an evolutionary logic of astroglial diversity. By highlighting both conserved and divergent features, this approach contributes to a broader understanding of glial biology and underscores the potential of cross-species transcriptomic comparisons to inform fundamental neuroscience.