Heritability of hippocampal functional and microstructural organisation

Abstract

The hippocampal formation is an uniquely infolded anatomical structure in the medial temporal lobe and it is involved in a broad range of cognitive and emotional processes. It consists of anatomically and functionally different subfields, including the subiculum (SUB), cornu ammonis areas (CA), and the dentate gyrus (DG). However, despite ample research on learning and plasticity of the hippocampal formation, heritability of its structural and functional organization is not fully known. To answer this question, we extracted microstructurally sensitive neuroimaging (i.e., T1w/T2w ratios) and resting-state functional connectivity information along hippocampal subfield surfaces from a sample of healthy twins and unrelated individuals of the Human Connectome Project Dataset. Our findings robustly demonstrate that functional connectivity and local microstructure of hippocampal subfields are highly heritable. Second, we found marked covariation and genetic correlation between the microstructure of the hippocampal subfields and the isocortex, indicating shared genetic factors influencing the microstructure of the hippocampus and isocortex. In both structural and functional measures, we observed a dissociation of cortical projections across subfields. In sum, our study shows that the functional and structural organization of the hippocampal formation is heritable and has a genetic relation to divergent macroscale functional networks within the isocortex.