As a tutor I had to facilitate a group project. I was tasked with the auditory cortex and after a quick google search I found this paper:
Gene Expression Identifies Distinct Ascending Glutamatergic Pathways to Frequency-Organized Auditory Cortex in the Rat Brain, by Storace, Higgins, Chikar, Oliver, and Read
It was all done in rat it seems. I sent out the paper to the group and we took a look at some of their findings in the paper in the Allen Mouse datasets. We were happy to find agreement in the Allen mouse gene expression and the connectivity atlases. Limited to the results regarding VGLUT1 and cortex <-> thalamus connections.
Here's the powerpoint presentation that summarizes our work.
So it's pretty easy to do a quick spatial correlative search in the Allen Brain atlas, to find other genes that have a similar pattern.
So the one gene we mention with a similar pattern is Kcnma1. I just tried to reproduce that on the Allen website and it's not so easy.
Here's the steps:
- search for slc17a7
- checkbox the saggital assay (the first one)
- goto the correlation box on the right and leave basic cell groups checked, and also checkbox thalamus
- click search in the correlation box
- Kcnma1 shows up as 6th.
It seems that search wasn't spatially restricted to thalamus as we have in the slides. You could try variations on that to find more genes - like selecting all three Slc17a7 assays.
When you get those lists, you should go through them by hand and take a look for gradients. We did this quickly for our project so the confidence we have in Kcnma1 is limited.
Also, one neat thing we found in the human data is that VGLUT2 is highly expressed in subcortical auditory regions like cochlear nuclei, Inferior Colliculus and others.. it's expressed all over.. but it's
relatively higher in those regions.
