Astrocytes drive divergent metabolic gene expression in humans and chimpanzees

Homo sapiens, Pan troglodytes Raw sequence reads; Previous work shows significant differences in metabolic gene expression between the brains of primates, but we have yet to fully resolve the contribution of distinct brain cell types. To investigate cell-type specific interspecies differences in brain gene expression, we conducted RNA-Seq on neural progenitor cells (NPCs), neurons, and astrocytes generated from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from humans and chimpanzees (three cell lines from three individuals per species). We conducted differential expression analyses and functional enrichments to determine significant differences in gene expression in a cell type by species manner.