Optimizing Early Post-Mortem Brain Cell Isolation for the HCA

To optimize protocols for single-cell isolation from human brain from early post-mortem tissue and surgically resected tissue, and to generate single-brain-cell data from subjects of a range of ages for the Human Cell Atlas.

The Monje lab demonstrated that the choice of enzymes used in tissue dissociation can have an effect on neural tissue viability. They have provided a protocol for cell isolation from post-mortem human brain, which they have used to isolate normal human microglias for comparison with pediatric glioma macrophages, as detailed in Lin et al., 2018. For this study, they performed single-cell RNA sequencing on a pilot cohort of human cortex cells spanning a range of ages.