For a long time, post-mortem analysis of human brain pathologies has been purely descriptive, limiting insight into the pathological mechanisms. However, starting in the early 2000s, next-generation sequencing (NGS) and the routine application of bulk RNA-sequencing and microarray technologies have revolutionized the usefulness of post-mortem human brain tissue. This has allowed many studies to provide novel mechanistic insights into certain brain pathologies, albeit at a still unsatisfying resolution, with masking of lowly expressed genes and regulatory elements in different cell types. The recent rapid evolution of single-cell technologies has now allowed researchers to shed light on human pathologies at a previously unreached resolution revealing further insights into pathological mechanisms that will open the way for the development of new strategies for therapies. In this review article, we will give an overview of the incremental information that single-cell technologies have given us for human white matter (WM) pathologies, summarize which single-cell technologies are available, and speculate where these novel approaches may lead us for pathological assessment in the future.

长期以来，对人脑病理的尸检分析纯粹是描述性的，限制了对病理机制的深入了解。然而，从 2000 年代初开始，新一代测序 (NGS) 以及批量 RNA 测序和微阵列技术的常规应用彻底改变了死后人类脑组织的用途。这使得许多研究能够为某些大脑病理学提供新颖的机制见解，尽管分辨率仍然不能令人满意，但掩盖了不同细胞类型中低表达的基因和调节元件。单细胞技术最近的快速发展使研究人员能够以前所未有的分辨率揭示人类病理学，揭示对病理机制的进一步见解，这将为开发新的治疗策略开辟道路。在这篇综述文章中，我们将概述单细胞技术为我们提供的有关人类白质 (WM) 病理学的增量信息，总结哪些单细胞技术可用，并推测这些新方法可能引导我们走向何方未来进行病理评估。