Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
A cell’s lineage describes the developmental history of a cell from its birth until its final division and differentiation into a particular cell type, which is known as its cell fate. Cell fate is determined by the actions of numerous cell intrinsic and extrinsic factors.
We present a developmental atlas that offers insight into sequential epigenetic changes underlying early human brain development modeled in organoids, which reconstructs the differentiation trajectories of all major CNS regions. It shows that epigenetic regulation via the installation of activating histone marks precedes activation of groups of neuronal genes.
The mechanisms underlying human cell diversity are unclear. Here the authors provide a single-cell epigenome map of human neural organoid development and dissect how epigenetic changes control cell fate specification from pluripotency to distinct cerebral and retina neural types.
How genetic information in the germinal zone determines neuronal cell types is unclear. Here the authors show that MEIS2 plays an important role in determining GABAergic neuron diversity during development.
PACS1 syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder resulting from a de novo p.R203W variant in phosphofurin acidic cluster sorting protein 1 (PACS1). Here the authors use cortical organoids to investigate the impact of this variant on neurodevelopment.
A stream of young neurons migrating into the entorhinal cortex (EC) continues postnatally in humans, but not in macaques; these young neurons, which belong to a unique class of local circuit cells, continue to be recruited in the EC during infancy and early childhood.
Human cerebellar development is fundamentally linked to its function. Here, the authors combine single-cell transcriptomics, spatial transcriptomics, and single-cell chromatin accessibility states to systematically depict an integrative spatiotemporal landscape of human fetal cerebellar development.
We present a developmental atlas that offers insight into sequential epigenetic changes underlying early human brain development modeled in organoids, which reconstructs the differentiation trajectories of all major CNS regions. It shows that epigenetic regulation via the installation of activating histone marks precedes activation of groups of neuronal genes.
We discovered expression of SYNGAP1, which encodes the ‘synaptic’ protein SYNGAP1, within human cortical progenitors. In an organoid model of SYNGAP1 haploinsufficiency, cortical neurogenesis and neuronal network activity were disrupted. This finding reveals an unknown function for SYNGAP1 at early stages of development, providing a new framework for understanding the pathophysiology of autism spectrum disorder.
A new technique developed by Garcia-Marques and colleagues uses CRISPR–Cas9 editing to activate an ordered sequence of fluorescent markers in stem cells and their progeny. These tools represent a new way to probe the spatial and temporal patterns of cell lineage progression.
A study in Nature describes RNA velocity, which is a computational method to derive dynamic gene expression information from static single-cell RNA sequencing data. It provides valuable insights into developmental trajectories of cells.