Progress toward complete cell-type and spatial-resolution atlases of the developing brain

Mammalian brain development is a complex process involving birth, lineage commitment, differentiation, and maturation of hundreds of cell types across multiple brain regions. This process unravels across months of prenatal development and years of postnatal life in the human and is governed by lineage and cell type-specific gene regulatory programs and involves several layers of epigenetic regulation to ensure the generation of proper committed neuronal and glial subtypes at appropriate time points. Exponential advances in single-cell genomics, including transcriptomic and later epigenetic profiling, allowed dissecting this diversity in the developing brain of humans and lower organisms. Current efforts toward complete atlases of the developing brain further expand these efforts by linking single-cell profiles to spatial tissue architecture and integrating multiple molecular modalities.