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Nature Neuroscience 11, 1237–1238 (1 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/nn1108-1237

What is in the brain soup?

K|[aacute]|roly Mirnics

Have you ever tried to identify all the critical ingredients of a soup in a great French restaurant? Sure, the taste is wonderful, but the complex mixing of flavors create confusion on your palate, making it almost impossible to decipher the individual ingredients that gave rise to this delightful medley of taste on your oral chemoreceptors. Simultaneous assessment of mRNA levels for thousands of genes in the brain tissue (transcriptome profiling) is much like soup degustation: these experiments are usually carried out on brain regions that harbor many different ingredients (cell types), each having its own unique signature.