Thread by @cedricboeckx

Two new papers that I enjoyed working on and that provide further evidence for the special role played by the #cerebellum (and subcortical structures) in the evolution of our lineage are out 🧠🧵

The first one, with @buisan_raul @juanandres_mp & @AGMAndirko, looks at gene expression patterns in large “introgression” deserts
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

Thanks @TavernaElena for the invitation to contribute to the volume she is co-editing, and to @david_machugh and @FabriMafe for very thoughtful comments during the reviewing process. They made the paper better.

Also very grateful to @MKuhlwilm for the nice discussions we have had about these introgression deserts over the years

Thanks also @melanoidin for raising interesting questions in his own work that inspired us and led to this project (Raul's MA thesis). I am glad we managed to replicate the striatum result by using different datasets

The second paper, with @AGMAndirko, looks at derived, Homo sapiens-specific high-frequency alleles that are associated with differential gene expression across brain structures derived from the GTEx database, and again brings out the cerebellum
bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…