Pericytes are organ-specific regulators of tissue morphogenesis.

Overview

1. Department of Tissue Morphogenesis, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine,Münster, Germany
2. Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, Bioinformatics Service Unit,Münster, Germany
3. Department of Vascular Cell Biology, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine,Münster, Germany
4. Vascular Patterning Dynamics Group, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine,Münster, Germany

Abstract

Endothelial cells lining the vessel network are indispensable for vascular transport but also provide paracrine signals controlling the behavior of nearby cell types. Pericytes are another essential component of the vessel wall, but little is known about their interactions with other cell populations during organ growth and patterning. Here, we use mouse genetics to address the function of three pericyte-derived factors in postnatal lung and brain. We find that inactivation of the gene for hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) or brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in pericytes causes no overt alterations in postnatal brain but impairs lung development, which we attribute to defective interaction with AT2 epithelial cells and pulmonary endothelium, respectively. In contrast, pericyte expression of the growth factor Nodal is dispensable for lung morphogenesis but regulates vessel growth and barrier function in the postnatal brain through interactions with endothelial cells, astrocytes and microglia. Taken together, our findings establish that pericytes are a critical source of paracrine signals controlling morphogenetic processes in an organ-specific fashion.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

No file of the authors' code could be read here: it is described below, and read at its source.

Code availability

Custom code for scRNA-seq analysis, based on existing packages and own contributions, is publicly available at https://keeper.mpdl.mpg.de/d/301c44f11ccb455ab199/. Dependencies “scrna-tools” and “anndataview” can be found at https://github.com/Bioinformatics-Service-MPI-Munster.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

Datasets cited

• geo:GSE285933, at NCBI GEO; found in “Data availability”

Data availability

The scRNA-seq data generated in this study have been deposited in the Gene Expression Omnibus under accession number GSE285933 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE285933). The mouse reference genome GRCm39 with GENCODE M26 annotation (https://www.gencodegenes.org/mouse/release_M26.html) was used for mapping the reads in this study. All other relevant data supporting the key findings of this study are available within the article and its Supplementary Information files. All measurements used for quantification are provided in the Source Data file along with the results of the different statistical analyses performed. Source data are provided with this paper. All individual mouse lines used in this study are commercially available at The Jackson Laboratory or through the lead author. All other biological materials described in this article are available through commercial suppliers as indicated. Source data are provided with this paper.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 28 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 7 authors, 3 keywords, 12 MeSH terms, 2 funders, 135 references.

Cite

This paper

Rasouli, S. J., Kruse, K., Diéguez-Hurtado, R., Ghanbari, P., Aravamudhan, A., Pitulescu, M. E., & Adams, R. H. (2026). Pericytes are organ-specific regulators of tissue morphogenesis. Nature communications, 17(1), 4229. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71643-1

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