Neuroscience research has entered a phase of key discoveries in the realm of neurogenomics owing to strong financial and intellectual support for resource building and tool development. The previous challenge of tissue heterogeneity has been met with the application of techniques that can profile individual cells at scale. Moreover, the ability to perturb genes, gene regulatory elements and neuronal activity in a cell-type-specific manner has been integrated with gene expression studies to uncover the functional underpinnings of the genome at a systems level. Although these insights have necessarily been grounded in model systems, we now have the opportunity to apply these approaches in humans and in human tissue, thanks to advances in human genetics, brain imaging and tissue collection. We acknowledge that there will probably always be limits to the extent to which we can apply the genomic tools developed in model systems to human neuroscience; however, as we describe in this Perspect
A Swiss Army Knife for Genomic Data
April 5, 2021Caltech
A good way to find out what a cell is doing whether it is growing out of control as in cancers, or is under the control of an invading virus, or is simply going about the routine business of a healthy cell is to look at its gene expression. Though a vast majority of cells in an organism all contain the same genes, how those genes are expressed is what gives rise to different cell types the difference between a muscle cell and a neuron, for example.
In the last decade, technologies to measure gene expression in individual cells have revolutionized biology. No longer do biologists need to average out gene expression over many cells within tissues; now they can detect which genes are active in each cell at any time.
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