“The cellular and molecular origins of complex human thought and behavior remain largely a mystery.”
Most articles in peer-reviewed journals do not begin with such a philosophical statement. But then other papers do not summarize the creation of a molecular atlas across the brain, “a critical and much-needed molecular and neurobiological map of complex human-relevant social behavior and disease, as well as an extensive substrate for comparative analyses across animal brains.”
The paper’s authors “generated a 4.2 million cell (combined) transcriptomic and epigenomic atlas across the brain of the rhesus macaque, the most widely used nonhuman primate model organism for studies of human perception, cognition, aging, and neurological disease…. To our knowledge, these data represent the largest and most comprehensive multimodal molecular atlas in a primate to date and provide a resource for exploring how the heterogeneous molecular and cellular composition of the brain gives rise to the behavioral complexity of primates including humans.”
