Open for (neuro)science tutorial: Allen Cell Types Database transcriptomics

Thanks for attending the webinar or viewing the video of the Open for (neuro)science tutorial: Allen Cell Types Database transcriptomics, with @RebeccaH! This webinar demonstrated how to use the transcriptomics datasets, online viewers, and more.

Please feel free to chime in here with additional questions or follow-up questions to those asked at the live webinar. You can find the recording of this webinar and information about other webinars in this series here.

Additional questions to those answered during the webinar Q&A:

Question: I’m curious to hear whether you have any thoughts on combining scRNA seq data with GWAS (genome-wide association studies) data to implicate specific cell types with human traits or psychiatric disorders? What major challenges do you foresee?
Rebecca: This is certainly and interesting idea and it is being pursued by a number of groups. A nice example of this is the publication by Skene et al. (Genetic identification of brain cell types underlying schizophrenia, Nature Genetics, 2018) that we contributed data to. We are exploring these types of analyses for a study examining variation in cell types and gene expression across a population of ~80 human tissue donors.

Question: In the future, do you have any plan to add more data other than human and mouse?
Rebecca: Yes, we are expanding our transcriptomics work into non-human primates (focusing on macaque monkey). We are also currently working on a comparative study of primary motor cortex across a diverse set of up to 20 different mammalian species.