Editor’s Choice Pick: “Uncovering Mirror Neurons Molecular Identity by Single-cell Transcriptomics and Microarray Analysis”

Meet the Student Author

YiFei Zhou is currently junior at YK Pao School in Shanghai, China. YiFei has always been driven by curiosity of the unknown, the most intimate of which is themselves: how they think, what they really want, why their emotion fluctuates. This introspective inquisitiveness underlies their interest in cognitive neuroscience.

Their paper therefore stemmed from a simple question: why do people instinctively smile back at strangers? YiFei was intrigued by the idea that mirror neurons can explain facial mimicry and more generally empathy and motor skill acquisition. YiFei started their scientific journey by asking a simple curiosity-driven question, which eventually yielded important results that contribute to our understanding of the human brain. Beside neuroscience, YiFei is also a big fan of skiing, rowing, hiking, traveling, playing frisbee, going to art museum and exhibitions, and Shakespeare.

Learn More About YiFei’s Research

Mirror neurons are a class of brain cells that are hypothesized to be responsible for higher-order cognitive features such as imitation and empathy. The activity of these neurons is usually studied by functional MRI and electrophysiology, which provide a coarse-grained picture of the mirror neuron function. In this study, YiFei explored the molecular features of mirror neurons by using computational genomics techniques, thus providing us with a potential finer-grained picture of these fascinating brain cells.

First, YiFei identified areas of the brain that are most likely to house groups of mirror neurons. They defined such areas by relying on previous functional MRI studies as well as the Allen Brain Atlas database, a key depository of functional, electrophysiological, and genomic data on the brain. Next, they compared the expression levels of every gene in these defined areas to their expression in the general gray matter of the brain. This allowed YiFei to identify mirror neurons as likely excitatory neurons.

To further constrain the molecular identity of the mirror neurons, YiFei then compared the differentially expressed genes to a dataset that clustered single neuron cells based on the genes they express. Finally, YiFei correlated the expression of genes that are implicated in major neurological disorders to their expression in the putative mirror neuron cluster, hinting at a potential link between mirror neurons and common brain disorders.

YiFei’s study paves a way for future molecular studies of mirror neurons and their role in human cognitive psychology as well as disorders. How exactly do the genes they identified confer the mirror neuron identity? How do they integrate into larger neuronal circuits? These are just some of the future questions that YiFei’s study springs to mind.

Check out the full manuscript to learn more about YiFei’s research and why her manuscript was selected as an Editor’s Choice manuscript.

The material on this page was prepared by Aleks Radakovic, JEI Managing Editor. YiFei Zhou provided the photo (pictured with their parents) and personal biography which was edited lightly for clarity.