Topic: single-cell RNA sequencing

The taste system detects 5 major categories of ethologically relevant stimuli (sweet, bitter, umami, sour and salt) and accordingly elicits acceptance or avoidance responses. While these taste responses are innate, the taste system retains a remarkable flexibility in response to changing external and internal contexts. Taste chemicals are first recognized by dedicated taste receptor cells (TRCs) and then transmitted to the cortex via a multi-station relay. I reasoned that if I could identify taste neural substrates along this pathway, it would provide an entry to decipher how taste signals are

Emerging genetic studies of late-onset Alzheimer’s Disease implicate the brain’s resident macrophages in the pathogenesis of AD. More than half the risk genes associated with late-onset AD are selectively expressed in microglia and peripheral myeloid cells; yet we know little about the underlying biology or how myeloid cells contribute to AD pathogenesis. Using single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics we identified molecular signatures that can be used to localize and monitor distinct microglia functional states in the human and mouse brain. Our results show that microglia assume

Octopuses are an emerging model organism in neurobiology due to their unique nervous system and capacity for intelligence. However, due to this novelty, nothing is currently known about many of their receptors, including those involved in neuromodulation. Given the historical significance of dopamine action in the brain and our recent findings implicating it as one of the three main neurotransmitters used in the optic lobe, we have chosen to explore dopaminergic GPCRs in Octopus vulgaris. We have identified approximately twenty candidate octopus monoamine GPCRs, utilising protein sequence simi

SP4 gene is one of the two risk genes implicated in schizophrenia in recent large unpublished case-controlled genomic and exomic sequencing studies. Data on Spatio-temporal SP4 expression in the brain and it's biological functions are sparse in published literature. Bulk RNA sequencing and single-cell high-resolution mid-gestation Spatio-temporal RNA sequencing studies on SP4 from certain brain regions were collated and analysed from published and unpublished databases. The results of bulk RNA sequencing show that SP4 is mainly expressed in the fetal brain. Single-cell RNA sequencing of the mi