Researchers have produced the largest map to date of gene activity in the human prefrontal cortex1, a brain area that supports planning, decision-making and behavioural and emotional regulation. The landmark map draws on sequencing data from more than six million individual cells from almost 1,500 people to inform the study of neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases in unprecedented detail. 'The scale of this project and the amount of work required to assemble it are genuinely impressive,' says Zhichao Miao, a computational biologist at the Guangzhou National Laboratory in China who was not involved in the work. 'Single-cell studies of the human brain have traditionally been limited to relatively small numbers of individuals. Pushing us into a population-scale setting changes the kinds of questions we can ask.' Panos Roussos, the director of the Center for Disease Neurogenomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and a co-author on all eight papers,...
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