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The dermis and epidermis, crucial structural layers of the skin, encompass appendages, hair follicles (HFs), and intricate cellular heterogeneity. However, an integrated spatiotemporal transcriptomic atlas of embryonic skin has not yet been described and would be invaluable for studying skin‐related diseases in humans. Here, single‐cell and spatial transcriptomic analyses are performed on skin samples of normal and hairless fetal pigs across four developmental periods. The cross‐species comparison of skin cells illustrated that the pig epidermis is more representative of the human epidermis than mice epidermis. Moreover, Phenome‐wide association study analysis revealed that the conserved genes between pigs and humans are strongly associated with human skin‐related diseases. In the epidermis, two lineage differentiation trajectories describe hair follicle (HF) morphogenesis and epidermal development. By comparing normal and hairless fetal pigs, it is found that the hair placode (Pc), the most characteristic initial structure in HFs, arises from progenitor‐like OGN+/UCHL1+ cells. These progenitors appear earlier in development than the previously described early Pc cells and exhibit abnormal proliferation and migration during differentiation in hairless pigs. The study provides a valuable resource for in‐depth insights into HF development, which may serve as a key reference atlas for studying human skin disease etiology using porcine models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurately predicting peptide secondary structures remains a challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in short peptides. In this study, PHAT is proposed, a deep hypergraph learning framework for the prediction of peptide secondary structures and the exploration of downstream tasks. The framework includes a novel interpretable deep hypergraph multi‐head attention network that uses residue‐based reasoning for structure prediction. The algorithm can incorporate sequential semantic information from large‐scale biological corpus and structural semantic information from multi‐scale structural segmentation, leading to better accuracy and interpretability even with extremely short peptides. The interpretable models are able to highlight the reasoning of structural feature representations and the classification of secondary substructures. The importance of secondary structures in peptide tertiary structure reconstruction and downstream functional analysis is further demonstrated, highlighting the versatility of our models. To facilitate the use of the model, an online server is established which is accessible via http://inner.wei‐group.net/PHAT/. The work is expected to assist in the design of functional peptides and contribute to the advancement of structural biology research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, published in Advanced Science, discusses the construction of a high-resolution spatial-temporal transcriptome atlas of pig skin. The study reveals similarities between pig and human early skin development and identifies a cell subpopulation that causes lower hair placode density and hairlessness in pigs. The findings provide valuable insights into hair follicle development and the etiology of human skin diseases, using the porcine model system. The article is authored by Yi Wang, Yao Jiang, Xiangdong Ding, and their colleagues. [Extracted from the article]