Transcriptome organization of primate neocortical layers and its human-specific change

We developped the unsupervised sectioning coupled with RNA-seq to generate data to estimate the laminar transcriptome profiles for primate prefrontal cortex. Each cortical cube was cut into 17-18 sections (DS1) or 10 sections (DS2) which are horizontal to the cortical layers. RNA-seq was then applied to profile transcriptome in each section sample. With this data, we were able to estimate and compare the laminar transcriptome profiles in three primate species: human, chimpanzee and macaque, which also provided the power to identify the genes with human-specific laminar expression profile.