April Flowers for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

A research team from the Allen Institute for Brain Science reports that human brains share a consistent genetic blueprint and possess enormous biochemical complexity. The findings, published in Nature, stem from the first in-depth and large-scale analysis of the vast data set publicly available in the Allen Human Brain Atlas.

The Allen Human Brain Atlas fully integrates different kinds of data across different scales of brain exploration in an open, public online resource. It details genes at work throughout the human brain with data incorporated from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) as well as histology and gene expression data derived from both microarray and in situ hybridization approaches.

The results of this new study are based on extensive analysis of the Allen Human Brain Atlas, specifically the detailed all-genes, all-structures survey of genes at work throughout the human brain. This enormous dataset profiles 400 to 500 distinct brain areas per hemisphere using microarray technology. It comprises more than 100 million gene expression measurements covering three individual human brains to date, including two clinically unremarkable brains donated by a 24-year-old and 39-year-old man, and half a brain from a third man.

Among other findings, these data show that 84% of all genes are expressed somewhere in the human brain and in patterns that are largely similar from one brain to the next.

This study demonstrates the value of a global analysis of gene expression throughout the entire brain and has implications for understanding brain function, development, evolution and disease, said Ed Lein, Ph.D., Associate Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and co-lead author on the paper.

These results only scratch the surface of what can be learned from this immense data set. We look forward to seeing what others will discover.

The team expects their work to serve as a baseline against which others can compare the genetic activity of diseased brains, and so shed light on factors that underlie neurological and psychiatric conditions.

The human brain is the most complex structure known to mankind and one of the greatest challenges in modern biology is to understand how it is built and organized, said Seth Grant, a professor of molecular neuroscience at Edinburgh University who worked on the brain map.

This allows us for the first time to overlay the human genome on to the human brain. It gives us essentially the Rosetta stone for understanding the link between the genome and the brain, and gives us a path forward to decoding how genetic disorders impact and produce brain disease, he said.

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Researchers Track Gene Expression To Create Atlas of Human Brain

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