A neuronal nucleus isolated from its cellUCSD, ZHANG LAB
Neurons within a single brain can differ from one another in genomic content—a phenomenon known as mosaicism. But the extent to which those differences are reflected in gene expression has remained uncertain, in large part because of the difficulty associated with analyzing transcription in individual cells. Now, a team led by researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has developed a high-throughput pipeline to analyze the transcriptomes of thousands of single neuronal nuclei, revealing considerable variation in gene expression across the human cerebral cortex. The findings were published today (June 23) in Science.
“There’s any number of studies currently in the literature that have, say, identified genes expressed ‘in the brain,’” said study coauthor ...
