ALLEN INSTITUTE FOR BRAIN SCIENCEResearchers from the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, in collaboration with scientists nationwide, have created a brain-wide map of gene expression during prenatal development. The map could shed light on how human brains develop differently than the brains of mice or even other primates. The data should also allow researchers to link genes implicated in developmental disorders to their expression patterns during development, which could help explain the roots of disorders like autism. The work is described in a paper published today (April 2) in Nature.
“There is no doubt that this is a . . . resource that will be of use for many developmental scientists,” said Wieland Huttner, a cell biologist and neurobiologist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. Huttner was not involved in the work, but had previously mapped gene expression in the human and mouse fetal brains.
“For scientists interested in the topic, it’s a gold mine to just go through the data and select the genome [they’re] interested in,” and to see how genes of interest are expressed in the developing brain, said Pierre Vanderhaeghen, a developmental neurobiologist at the University of Brussels in Belgium, who also did not participate in the research.
The researchers examined tissues from ...
