The consortium of BrainSpan (www.brainspan.org) has been working on deciphering the transcriptional architecture of the developing and adult human brain using multiple platforms. One of the main goals has been to provide a large-scale and integrated analysis of the genome, transcriptome, and epigenome of the human brain at the single nucleotide resolution. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that all these integrative analyses were performed on the same brain tissue samples, which consisted of sixteen regions, including eleven neocortical areas, of human donors of both sexes and two ethnic groups (African-Americans and Caucasians). In addition, we have compared these human datasets to complementary data we generated from homologous regions of chimpanzee and macaque monkey brains. This comparative analysis allowed us to uncover new features that appear to be human-specific and may be crucial to our cognitive evolution.

The consortium of BrainSpan (www.brainspan.org) has been working on deciphering the transcriptional architecture of the developing and adult human brain using multiple platforms. One of the main goals has been to provide a large-scale and integrated analysis of the genome, transcriptome, and epigenome of the human brain at the single nucleotide resolution. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that all these integrative analyses were performed on the same brain tissue samples, which consisted of sixteen regions, including eleven neocortical areas, of human donors of both sexes and two ethnic groups (African-Americans and Caucasians). In addition, we have compared these human datasets to complementary data we generated from homologous regions of chimpanzee and macaque monkey brains. This comparative analysis allowed us to uncover new features that appear to be human-specific and may be crucial to our cognitive evolution.