Contact: Jules Asher
NIH/National Institute of Mental Health
Caption: Our brains are all made of the same stuff. Despite individual and ethnic genetic diversity, our prefrontal cortex shows a consistent molecular architecture. For example, overall differences in the genetic code (“genetic distance”) between African -Americans (AA) and caucasians (cauc) showed no effect on their overall difference in expressed transcripts (“transcriptional distance”). The vertical span of color-coded areas is about the same, indicating that our brains all share the same tissue at a molecular level, despite distinct DNA differences on the horizontal axis. Each dot represents a comparison between two individuals. The AA::AA comparisons (blue) generally show more genetic diversity than cauc::cauc comparisons (yellow), because caucasians are descended from a relatively small subset of ancestors who migrated from Africa, while African Americans are descended from a more diverse gene pool among the much larger population that remained in Africa. AA::cauc comparisons (green) differed most across their genomes as a whole, but this had no effect on their transcriptomes as a whole.
Credit: Joel Kleinman, M.D., Ph.D., NIMH Clinical Brain Disorders Branch
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Related news release: Our brains are made of the same stuff, despite DNA differences