The neocortex is the seat of human intellect. New data suggests that mammals created it with new types of cells only after their evolutionary split from reptiles.
. She teamed up with Laurent, her postdoc mentor, to see what single-cell RNA sequencing could reveal about new and old cell types in a comparison of a lizard brain to a mouse brain. First they compared the full array of neural cell types in each species to find the ones that they shared, which must have been passed down from a common ancestor. Then they looked for neural cell types that differed between the species.
, an evolutionary neuroscientist at Cornell University, thinks it is still necessary to look at how neurons are generated and how they migrate and connect up during development, rather than only comparing where they end up in adult amphibian, reptilian and mammalian brains. Finlay thinks it would be “terrific” if those findings could all be pulled together. “I think we will in time,” she said.
The work from Tosches and her colleagues has also prompted new discussions about whether the field should reconsider what a cerebral cortex is and which animals have one. The current definition says that a cerebral cortex must have visible neural layers like the neocortex or DVR, but Tosches regards that as “baggage” left over from traditional neuroanatomy. When her team used the new sequencing tools, they found evidence of layers in the salamander’s brain as well.
Babbitt thinks that Tosches has a point. “How these things were defined with classical morphology is probably just not going to hold up just based on the tools that we have now,” Babbitt said.
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