Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Functional Genomics of Human Brain Development

We have assembled extensive collections of multi-omic data centered on the development and mature function of the neocortex at NeMO Analytics: https://nemoanalytics.org/landing/neocortex. This public research resource enables cell biologists without coding expertise to explore the expression of individual genes as well as complex gene signatures across the vast data compendium. By combining our novel joint decomposition (https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.07.515489) and projection (https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa183) methods with these data collections enables the in silico molecular dissection of brain development in powerful new ways (https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.02.26.581612). Just as we can identify shared molecular dynamics across development of different mammals (as in the image), we can also interrogate data from pluripotent stem cell derived cerebral organoids to understand which elements of in vivo development are recapitulated with high-fidelity in vitro. Using these approaches, we have recently made fundamental advances in understanding the origins of human variation during the emergence of the neural lineage from pluripotency, which we believe will empower personalized medicine via the use of patient stem cells to understand health and disease across the lifetime of individual patients (https://www.cell.com/stem-cell-reports/fulltext/S2213-6711(24)00213-3). For more details see carlocolantuoni.org.