Research articles

The authors created a comprehensive developmental cell atlas for spatiotemporal gene expression of the human spinal cord, revealed species-specific regulation during development and used the atlas to infer novel markers for pediatric ependymomas.

Andersen, Thom and colleagues reveal the single-cell-resolution transcriptome of the midgestation human spinal cord and discover remarkable heterogeneity across and within cell types.

The authors pooled resources to identify best practices and develop a new standardized protocol for estimating functional connectivity in rats with magnetic resonance imaging.

Knowing one’s own behavioral state is important to contextualize sensory cues and identify appropriate future actions. Here the authors show how neurons ascending from the fly motor system convey behavioral state signals to specific brain regions.

The authors developed an optimized rabies tracing system for generating brain-wide monosynaptic input connectomes, and applied it in mouse visual cortex to reveal topographically organized subnetworks co-defined by visual areas, layers and cell classes.

Brain images from the Chinese Human Connectome Project (CHCP) are now publicly available to facilitate transcultural and cross-ethnic brain–mind studies. Comparisons found reproducible brain parcellations but most differences were in language processing.

Humphrey et al. analyzed genetic and gene expression data from the postmortem spinal cords of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), observing changes in cell type composition and highlighting new risk genes.

Chiou et al. provide a multiregion bulk (N = 527 samples) and single-nucleus (N = 24 samples) brain transcriptional dataset encompassing 15 brain regions and both sexes in a unique population of free-ranging, behaviorally phenotyped rhesus macaques.

In this work, the authors transcriptionally and genetically profile 443 caudate nucleus samples, including 154 with schizophrenia, highlighting new genes associated with schizophrenia risk, including the presynaptic DRD2 isoform.

Leng et al. establish CRISPRi screens in astrocytes to dissect pathways controlling inflammatory reactivity. They uncover two distinct inflammatory reactive signatures that are inversely regulated by STAT3 and validate that these exist in human disease.

Hansen et al. compile and share an atlas of neurotransmitter receptor/transporter densities in the human cortex and show that receptor achitecture reflects brain structure, function, dynamics, cognitive specialization and disease vulnerability.

Somatosensory neurons detect pain, temperature and touch. Keeler et al. constructed a single-cell, protein-level atlas of nearly 3 million cells from the mouse dorsal root ganglia, covering 13 days of embryonic and postnatal development.

Colombo et al. build a morphological spectrum of over 40,000 microglia across development and disease with a topological data analysis approach that allows mapping of new conditions along these sex-region-specific and brain-region-specific atlases.

The authors generated the largest epigenome atlas of postmortem brains with Alzheimer’s disease. They reported regulatory genomic signatures associated with AD, including variability in open chromatin regions, transcription factor networks and cis-regulatory domains.

Duffy et al. profiled mRNA translation in 73 human prenatal and adult cortex samples and identified thousands of previously unknown translation events, including small open reading frames that give rise to human-specific and/or brain-specific microproteins.

Bryois et al. mapped genetic variants regulating gene expression in eight major brain cell types. They found a large number of cell-type-specific genetic effects and leveraged their results to identify novel putative risk genes for brain disorders.

Single-cell analysis of immune cells from surgically resected human epileptic brain tissues showed heterogeneity and pro-inflammatory signaling in microglia and evidence for direct interaction of microglia with T cells.

By complementing spatial transcriptomics with high-resolution proteomics, Kaufmann et al. tracked a gradient of disease severity across the brains of patients with progressive multiple sclerosis, uncovering new therapeutic opportunities to slow disease.

The existence of adult neurogenesis in primates is controversial. Hao et al. performed single-cell RNA sequencing with immunostaining and neurosphere cultures on adult macaques and revealed robust neurogenesis in the adult macaque hippocampus.

Wang et al. present a new open resource from the UK Biobank using quantitative susceptibility mapping, a neuroimaging marker sensitive to iron and myelin. They demonstrate a broad range of phenotypic and genetic associations in 35,885 participants.