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A recipe book for cell types in the human brain

Whether cell types in the brain have been conserved during evolution is not clear. A comparison of the molecular recipes that define brain cell types in humans and mice reveals similarities and differences between species.
  1. Matthew G. Keefe

    1. Matthew G. Keefe is in the Departments of Anatomy and of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143, USA.

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  2. Tomasz J. Nowakowski

    1. Tomasz J. Nowakowski is in the Departments of Anatomy and of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143, USA; and also at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco.

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To create a new dish, a chef must select ingredients and mix them to achieve different tastes and textures. Similarly, the expression of various combinations of thousands of genes creates and maintains the many diverse ‘flavours’ of each type of cell in the brain. Writing in Nature, Hodge et al.1 report their analysis of gene expression in single cells from the brain to present a ‘cookbook’ of molecular recipes for the neuronal cell types in the human cerebral cortex, a part of the brain required for many cognitive processes. By comparing gene-expression profiles of human and mouse neurons, they reveal a striking conservation of molecularly defined cell types during evolution, but also highlight many key species-specific differences in gene expression within conserved cell types.

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Nature 573, 36-37 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02343-8

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