In this paper, we report a spatial single-cell atlas of human cortical development, revealing surprisingly early specification of human cortical layers and areas. The key findings of the paper are:
- A sharp molecular border between V1 and V2 appears by GW20—long before the anatomical boundary.
- The six-layer cortical structure is detectable by GW22 from excitatory neuron subtypes, despite no visible lamination.
Our study emphasizes the synergistic analysis of molecular and spatial data, yielding insights unattainable through traditional methodologies and setting a paradigm for a comprehensive spatial developmental atlas of the human brain.
This paper is a collaborative project between Dr. Xuyu Qian and Dr. Christopher Walsh at Boston Children’s Hospital. The co–first authors are Biostatistics PhD students Kyle Coleman and Shunzhou Jiang.