A call for a unified and multimodal definition of cellular identity in the enteric nervous system

Abstract

The enteric nervous system (ENS), the largest division of autonomic nervous system, is a tantalizing frontier in neuroscience. With the advent of single-cell transcriptomics, the ENS has been increasingly well-characterized. Precise functional mapping of enteric neuron diversity is critical for understanding ENS biology and disease, but technical barriers remain. We used different approaches to compare and contrast functional annotations of several independently-reported ENS datasets. Differential module scoring, co-expression and correlation analysis, unbiased biological function hierarchical clustering, data integration and label transfer highlighted substantial discrepancies stemming from..