Vast diversity of human brain cell types revealed in trove of new datasets

New catalogs detail thousands of cell types that populate the human brain and that of our closest primate relatives.The findings appear in 21 papers published today in Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine."It's a huge, huge enterprise," says Joshua Sanes, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University, who was not involved in the work."It really is what translational neuroscience and systems neuroscience, as well as molecular neuroscience, will be building on for the next 10, 20 years."The new work used single-cell molecular approaches to identify more than 3,000 distinct neuronal and non-neuronal cell types within the developing and the adult human brain.Individual studies also compare cell composition across samples from 75 people and eight cortical regions, and across humans and four non-human primate species.This effort represents a step toward a single-cell atlas of the human brain and begins to provide information about "what might make us uniquely human at the cellular level," says Andrea Beckel- Mitchener, deputy director of the U.