Evolutionary innovations of human cerebral cortex viewed through the lens of high-throughput sequencing

Abstract

Humans had acquired a tremendously enlarged cerebral cortex containing a huge quantity and variety of cells during evolution. Such evolutionary uniqueness offers a neural basis of our cognitive innovation and human‐specific features of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. Since human brain is hardly examined in vivo with experimental approaches commonly applied on animal models, the recent advancement of sequencing technologies offers an indispensable viewpoint of human brain anatomy and development. This review introduces the recent findings on the unique features in the adult and the characteristic developmental processes of the human cerebral cortex, based on high‐throughput DNA sequencing technologies.