Abstract: PURPOSE: Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are the brain’s only gateway to the visual world. They can be classified into different types based on their electrophysiological, transcriptomic or morphological characteristics. However, whether the transcriptomic types have their corresponding phenotypes are still unknown.
METHODS: Here we characterized the transcriptomic, morphological and functional features of 472 high-quality RGCs using Patch-seq, providing functional and morphological annotation of many transcriptomic defined cell types of previously established RGC atlas.
RESULTS: We showed a convergence of different modalities in defining the RGC identity, and revealed the degree of correspondence for well-characterized cell types across multimodal data. Moreover, we complemented newly discovered RGC types with detailed morphological and functional properties. We also identified differentially expressed genes among ON, OFF and ON-OFF RGCs such as Vat1l, Slitrk6 and Lmo7, providing candidate marker genes for functional studies.
CONCLUSIONS: Our research suggests that the molecularly distinct clusters may also differ in their roles of encoding visual information.

Key words: Patch-seq, cell atlas, retinal ganglion cells, scRNA-seq