Human Brain Evolution

Human nervous system development is an intricate and protracted process that requires precise spatio-temporal transcriptional regulation. Comparative transcriptomic profiling offers unbiased insight into conserved and species-specific molecular programs underlying cellular and functional development of the human nervous system. However, a systematic characterization of the spatial and temporal transcriptomic landscapes of the macaque brain at the region-specific and single-cell levels, as well as the identification of shared and divergence features between human and macaque, are lacking.

Here, we present the generation and comparative analysis of tissue-level RNA-seq datasets covering prenatal and postnatal periods of human and macaque brain development as well as single-cell and single-nucleus analyses of gene expression in midfetal development and adulthood, respectively.