Emi Ling, James Nemesh, Melissa Goldman, Nolan Kamitaki, Nora Reed, Robert E Handsaker, Giulio Genovese, Jonathan S Vogelgsang, Sherif Gerges, Seva Kashin, Sulagna Ghosh, John M Esposito, Kiely Morris, Daniel Meyer, Alyssa Lutservitz, Christopher D Mullally, Alec Wysoker, Liv Spina, Anna Neumann, Marina Hogan, Kiku Ichihara, Sabina Berretta, Steven A McCarroll
Human brains vary across people and over time; such variation is not yet understood in cellular terms. Here we describe a relationship between people's cortical neurons and cortical astrocytes. We used single-nucleus RNA sequencing to analyse the prefrontal cortex of 191 human donors aged 22-97 years, including healthy individuals and people with schizophrenia. Latent-factor analysis of these data revealed that, in people whose cortical neurons more strongly expressed genes encoding synaptic components, cortical astrocytes more strongly expressed distinct genes with synaptic functions and genes for synthesizing cholesterol, an astrocyte-supplied component of synaptic membranes...
March 6, 2024: Nature