NEUROSCIENCE PERSPECTIVES Single-Cell Molecular Biology: Implications for Diagnosis and Treatment of Neurologic Disease

The continued discovery of basic pathologic mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric illnesses will be critical to the development of improved diagnostic tests and more tar-geted therapeutic strategies. Molecular biological meth-ods capable of evaluating gene expression at the single-cell level have great potential for advancing our knowledge of these processes. This review describes two techniques that are providing new insights into the intra-cellular regulation of ribonucleic acid trafficking and processing. These technologies promise to accelerate our understanding of both normal and abnormal molecular processes within neurons, and they have the potential for direct application to the study of human neurologi