Although all cells in the human body have the same genetic code, they vary hugely in their structures and functions. At the crossroads between the genome and the phenotype is the transcriptome - a list of the mRNA transcripts that are found in a given cell or tissue type - which reflects differences in gene expression between different cells. A new publication from the Allen Human Brain Atlas describes the adult human brain transcriptome in unprecedented anatomical detail. The study of tissue-specific tran-scriptomes has become increasingly widespread, but the size and complexity of the human brain, coupled with the scarcity of post-mortem samples, has made it difficult to carry out detailed transcriptome analysis of the brain.
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