How our brains are built: emerging approaches to understand human-specific features.

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Understanding what makes us uniquely human is a long-standing question permeating fields from genomics, neuroscience, and developmental biology to medicine. Here, we review the landscape of human-specific loci and describe how emerging technologies are being used to understand their molecular functions and impact on brain development.

🔑 Key Findings

• The discovery of human-specific genomic sequences has enabled a new understanding of the molecular features of human brain evolution.
• Advances in sequencing, computational, and in vitro screening approaches collectively reveal new roles of uniquely human sequences in regulating gene expression.
• Here, we review the landscape of human-specific loci and describe how emerging technologies are being used to understand their molecular functions and impact on brain development.

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