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. 2019 Feb 4;9:1262. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-37766-2

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Proposed model. Differentiation of somatic cells in the ovarian follicle is dependent on contact with the oocyte or with the basal lamina. Here, a granulosa cell becomes a cumulus cell (green) if it contacts the oocyte through TZPs and receives the GDF9 signal from the oocyte. If a granulosa cell makes contact with the basal lamina, it becomes an outer mural granulosa cell (purple). Conversely, if a granulosa cell does not make contact with the oocyte or with the basal lamina, it remains as an inner mural granulosa cell (blue), the default phenotype.