Wow, that's pretty cool. Do we have a complete lineage for any other mature tissue/cell types?
It's not as exciting as a breakthrough as it sounds though. One lab was rich enough to buy the existing tech to sequence it all, and the analytical pipelines are mature enough to do the clustering and lineage tracing for you. Overcoming the batch effects and integrating the different data into each other is still a legitimate struggle, so props to them on that.
Essentially, this a "FIRST!" kind of post, without much science behind it, but it does allow others to tease out new development pathways from the same data, and it acts as a control dataset for others who study mutants which usually have a gene or two knocked out.
The knockouts are where the real science is, but I'm possibly gatekeeping in those last two paragraphs there.
Also, how are these datasets to be shared? In some of the sets I've worked with, I've had to reintegrate subsets myself because though the authors published the embeddings of their data (e.g. cell1 is at position X and Y on PC1 and PC2), they flat out refused to publish the loadings (e.g. PC1 is made up of GeneX, GeneY, ...) making it obscenely hard to project your own data on to these reference Atlas's.
Yes, I'm disillusioned in general when I see these papers.