Orthologous marker groups reveal broad cell identity conservation across plant single-cell transcriptomes.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is widely used in plant biology and is a powerful tool for studying cell identity and differentiation. However, the scarcity of known cell-type marker genes and the divergence of marker expression patterns limit the accuracy of cell-type identification and our capacity to investigate cell-type conservation in many species. To tackle this challenge, we devise a novel computational strategy called Orthologous Marker Gene Groups (OMGs), which can identify cell types in both model and non-model plant species and allows for rapid comparison of cell types across many published single-cell maps.