Cover image

This piece of digital artwork, named “Brain Soup,” represents the process of Y Chromosome loss in human brain tissue. The ceramic bowl represents the skull. The noodles are a magnified, cellular interpretation of brain tissue encompassing cell types including neurons (yellow and blue) and microglia (red). The spoon represents the blood-brain barrier and the connection between the brain and peripheral immune system. Note the Y-shaped alphabet noodles—these represent lost Y Chromosomes recently ejected from the genome of their cell-of-origin. In this issue, a cell type–specific investigation of Y Chromosome loss explores human brain tissue and reveals a strong enrichment of Y loss in the microglia of aging and Alzheimer's-affected men. The image was generated using a combination of two large-scale text-to-image generation models: Midjourney and OpenAI's DALLE-2, the draft versions of which were reviewed, edited, and revised by the author who takes ultimate responsibility for the content. (Cover artwork by Michael Vermeulen. [For details, see Vermeulen et al., pp. 1795–1807.])