Stanford Team Uses Single-Cell RNA-Seq to Characterize Human Brain Cells

from GenomeWeb

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – In a study appearing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Stanford University researcher Stephen Quake and colleagues presented results from a single-cell transcriptome sequencing study of human brain cells.

The team did single-cell RNA sequencing on almost 500 adult or fetal brain cells, plucked from cortical brain rain cellsregions. The resulting transcriptional sequences broadly clustered the cells of all of the brain’s main sub-types — from microglia and astrocytes to neurons. But they also revealed clusters that coincided with neuronal sub-populations that varied by location and developmental stage.

“These results lay the groundwork for the construction of a cellular map of the human brain that can be completed through the analysis of a larger number of cells from different anatomical regions of the brain,” Quake and co-authors wrote. (read more…)