Transcriptome Analysis of Human Brain Development

The human brain transcriptome database was used to assess the gene expression profiles in the in vivo human brain development, available at http://hbatlas.org/ (Kang et al., 2011 (link)). Only data for neocortical areas were used (“Gene search,” Brain structure = “neocortical areas”). The detailed procedures for data collection have been published (Kang et al., 2011 (link)). A detailed description about the process starting from tissue sampling till plotting the diagrams are described here: https://hbatlas.org/files/nature10523-s1.pdf. According to the database, the exon-level transcriptome data was generated using the Affymetrix GeneChip Human Exon 1.0 ST Arrays. The signal intensity for all probes were averaged to obtain an expression value for the probe set. The median of all probe sets within one gene (transcript cluster) was used as the estimate of gene expression. The probe set signal intensity represents the exon expression level (Kang et al., 2011 (link)).