‘Human Accelerated Regions’: How They Make our Brains Uniquely Human

Boston Children’s Hospital Answers blog post highlighting collaborative research between the labs of Christopher A. Walsh and Michael E. Greenberg, focused on HARs -- human accelerated regions – which are the fastest evolving regions of the human genome. The authors provide epigenomic profiles of over 3,100 HARs and discover that nearly half of all HARs have features of gene regulatory proteins thought to be involved in neural development. This is particularly interesting in the context of autism because a past study from the Walsh lab suggests that some individuals with ASD may have increased mutations in HARs.

See original research article in Neuron.