RNA-seq of male and female control cortex

Purpose: The goal of this study was to compare gene expression patterns in the male and female human cortex Methods: We performed RiboZero Gold (rRNA depleted) 50bp PE RNA-seq in a set of control samples of both sexes to identify sexually dimorphic gene expression patterns. Results: Within these samples, we corroborated findings from a discovery set of RNA-seq data from adult human cortex tissue from the BrainSpan consortium which demonstrated male-biased expression of astrocyte marker genes and a gene co-expression module found to be up-regulated in the adult autistic cortex. Conclusions: These findings suggest that sex-differential risk for autism spectrum disorder is not the result of sex-differential regulation of ASD risk genes, but of naturally occurring sexually dimorphic processes that modulate the impact of risk variants for autism spectrum disorder. 13 cerebral cortex samples from 10 individuals (7 samples from 5 males, 6 samples from 5 females). Three Samples are included in this study from Series GSE64018. **PLEASE NOTE: Raw data has been submitted to dbGAP**