FACS sorting and antibody-specific beads have been utilized to isolate live human neurons as well as single cell nuclear transcriptomes in postmortem human brain (Krishnaswami et al., 2016). More commonly, cultured human cells have been sequenced to identify cell-type specific transcriptomes (Srinivasan et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2016). However this does not allow for analysis of brain regional differences in individual cell types. Thus, single cell transcriptome analysis in human brain is preferable for this purpose (Darmanis et al., 2015). Similar to mouse cell-type transcriptome databases, these methods provide novel markers for cell identification, tools for genetic manipulation, and insights into disease states.
