Overview
Our scRNA-seq comparison of 85,107 pre- and 46,111 post-menopausal fallopian tube cells reveals substantial shifts in cell type frequencies, gene expression, transcription factor activity, and cell-to-cell communications during menopause and menstrual cycle. Menstrual cycle dependent hormonal changes regulate distinct molecular states in fallopian tube secretory epithelial cells. Postmenopausal fallopian tubes show high chromatin accessibility in transcription factors associated with aging such as Jun, Fos, and BACH1/2, while hormone receptors were generally downregulated, a small proportion of secretory epithelial cells had high expression of ESR2, IGF1R, and LEPR. While a pre-menopausal secretory epithelial gene cluster is enriched in the immunoreactive molecular subtype, a subset of genes expressed in post-menopausal secretory epithelial cells show enrichment in the mesenchymal molecular type of high-grade serous ovarian cancer.
The Dataset:
This is a single-cell multi-omics dataset of healthy human fallopian tube (FT) tissue collected from 17 women (donors D1–D19) undergoing surgery for benign gynecologic conditions. The cohort includes both pre- and post-menopausal patients.
The core data consists of.
The pre-menopausal samples were stratified by menstrual cycle phase (proliferative vs. secretory), determined by endometrial histology. Notably, the post-menopausal cohort skewed Caucasian and the pre-menopausal cohort was predominantly African American, which the authors acknowledge as a potential confounding factor.
The dataset identifies 12 major cell types and multiple subtypes, and is cross-referenced against TCGA bulk RNA-seq data from high-grade serous ovarian cancer to connect normal FT biology to cancer subtypes.