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For years, neurons in the brain were assumed to all carry the same genome, with differences in cell type stemming from epigenetic, transcriptional, and posttranscriptional differences in how that genome was expressed. But in the past decade, researchers have recognized an incredible amount of genomic diversity, in addition to other types of cellular variation that can affect function. Indeed, the human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons, and we now know that there may be almost as many unique cell types.
Our interest in this incredible diversity emerged from experiments that we initially labeled as failures. In 1995, we (F.H.G. and colleagues) found that a protein called fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) is important for maintaining adult neural progenitor cells (NPCs) in a proliferative state ...
