Not my claim so I’m not defending this too hard but from my lab experience relatively few genes seem to control bulk properties and then there are a whole bunch of higher order corrections. Literally one or two genes being on/off can determine if a neuron is excitatory or inhibitory. If you subscribe to Izhikevich’s classification of bistable/monostable and integrator/resonator you would only need 3 genes with binary expression. After that you get a few more to determine time constants and stuff. I still think whole transcriptome would be helpful, especially as we don’t know what each gene does yet, but I am not 100% against the idea that only ~20 really matter with a few thousand template neurons and after that you run into a practical limit of noise being present.
Not my claim so I’m not defending this too hard but from my lab experience relatively few genes seem to control bulk properties and then there are a whole bunch of higher order corrections. Literally one or two genes being on/off can determine if a neuron is excitatory or inhibitory. If you subscribe to Izhikevich’s classification of bistable/monostable and integrator/resonator you would only need 3 genes with binary expression. After that you get a few more to determine time constants and stuff. I still think whole transcriptome would be helpful, especially as we don’t know what each gene does yet, but I am not 100% against the idea that only ~20 really matter with a few thousand template neurons and after that you run into a practical limit of noise being present.