Regional transcriptional signatures are highly conserved between the two brains assayed. These two individuals were males of similar age and ethnicity and therefore do not capture population or sex diversity; nevertheless, this high degree of similarity is suggestive of a strong underlying common blueprint for the human brain transcriptome and is consistent with other recent studies of human neocortical gene expression4, 5. The availability of an entire hemisphere of a third brain specimen, as remarked above, enabled several confirmatory analyses to be performed. In particular, Supplementary Figs 11–13 report positively on the network analyses, structural variation of gene expression, and genetic topography of the neocortex. In summary, the high recapitulation of gene expression patterns across all three brains indicates that the basic transcriptional blueprint is robust across individuals. Ongoing work is focused on processing additional brains of both sexes to estimate the consistency of this blueprint.
