EDITOR'S CHOICE IN NEUROSCIENCE H. Zeng et al., “Large-scale
cellular-resolution gene profiling in human neocortex reveals
species-specific molecular signatures,” Cell, 149:48-96, 2012.
Whole-genome sequencing has given researchers a good sense of
which genes are shared between, for example, humans and mice.
But little is known about how the expression patterns of these
genes differ. Hongkui Zeng of the Allen Institute for Brain
Science in Seattle, Washington, and colleagues took slices of
human brains collected from postmortem biopsies and tested the
expression of 1,000 key neuronal genes. They found that about 21
percent of the gene-expression profiles differed between the two
species. Researchers took thin slices from regions of the brain
involved in processing visual and sensory information and
scanned them for the in situ expression of 1,000 genes that act
as markers of cell type or are involved in disease, evolution,
or cortical function. They compared gene expression of three
areas of the cortex across