Spatiotemporal gene expression trajectories reveal developmental hierarchies of the human cortex

Abstract

Building a brain The human brain is built in an inside-out manner as a series of layers. Although progenitor cells spin off new neurons in a seemingly organized fashion, the devil is in the details. Nowakowski et al. analyzed the transcriptomes of single cells from the developing brain to elucidate the hidden complexity of brain construction. For each cell, its position within the brain matters, as well as what type of neuron is being made at what point during overall development. These individual expression patterns result in organized diversity in the brain's cortex. Science , this issue p. 1318