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A gene-expression axis defines neuron behaviour

A combination of functional imaging and gene-expression profiling in brain tissue has been used to unravel the properties of 35 subtypes of neuron in mice, revealing a gene-expression axis that governs each subtype’s activity.
  1. Hongkui Zeng

    1. Hongkui Zeng is at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Seattle, Washington 98109, USA.

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  2. Saskia E. J. de Vries

    1. Saskia E. J. de Vries is at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, Seattle, Washington 98109, USA.

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An essential step towards understanding how the brain works is to create a catalogue of brain-cell types. Cell-type classification has been transformed by single-cell transcriptomics, which reveals the entire repertoire of expressed genes (the transcriptome) in each of thousands or millions of single cells isolated from a brain region of interest1. But what do these cell types do, and what parts do they play in neuronal circuits? Writing in Nature, Bugeon et al.2 attempt to address these questions by developing an approach to measuring the in vivo activities of transcriptomically defined cell types in the mouse visual cortex.

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Nature 607, 243-244 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01640-z

References

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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