A cell type transcriptome atlas for human pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and minor salivary glands

Summary The human pituitary, adrenal, thyroid and minor salivary glands have distinct yet interconnected roles in endocrine and exocrine regulation, contributing to systemic homeostasis, metabolism, stress response, and oral health. Despite their importance, transcriptional characterisation at the single-cell level remains relatively limited for these glands, compared to other tissues. Genes with cell type specific expression typically encode proteins essential for specialised functions, making their identification key for understanding physiology and pathophysiology. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has facilitated the profiling of such genes, but challenges such as dissociation-induced artefacts, protocol-dependent cell loss, and data sparsity limit the analysis of certain cell types and lowly expressed genes. Here, we applied an integrative network analysis to a dataset of over 1400 bulk RNA-seq samples from human pituitary, adrenal, thyroid, and minor salivary glands to predict genome-wide, cell type-enriched transcriptomes. Cross-gland analyses revealed core transcriptional similarities among functionally related cell types, such as neuroendocrine cells, while tissue subset analyses revealed pituitary gonadotropes as the predominant site of sex-specific variation. This study provides a useful additional resource for investigating glandular function in health and disease.