Shaping Brain Structure: Genetic and Phylogenetic Axes of Macro Scale Organization of Cortical Thickness

Abstract

2Structural and functional characteristics of the cortex systematically vary along global axes as 3 a function of cytoarchitecture, gene expression, and connectivity. The topology of the cerebral 4 cortex has been proposed to be a prerequisite for the emergence of human cognition and 5 explain both the impact and progression of pathology. However, the neurogenetic origin of 6 these organizational axes in humans remains incompletely understood. To address this gap in 7 the literature our current study assessed macro scale cortical organization through an 8 unsupervised machine learning analysis of cortical thickness covariance patterns and used 9 converging methods to evaluate its genetic basis. In a large-scale sample of twins (n=899) we 1 0found structural covariance of thickness to be organized along both an anterior-to-posterior

The frequency gradient of human resting-state brain oscillations follows cortical hierarchies

“…A similar inferior-superior gradient was also observed for cortical thickness. This finding is supported by a recent study reporting an inferior-superior gradient organization of the CT in human and macaque monkeys (Valk et al, 2020), and has been attributed to the organization patterns expected based on the theory of dual origin (Goulas et al, 2018).…”

“…Since this progression of cortical hierarchical level coincides with the observed gradient in PF, we tested the hypothesis that the PF gradient is more closely related to cortical hierarchical level than to spatial location. We used cortical thickness (CT) as a proxy for the quantification of the hierarchical level of brain areas (Valk et al, 2020;Wagstyl et al, 2015).…”

Imaging evolution of the primate brain: the next frontier?

“…If this assumption is correct, combining genetic measurements with cortical folding patterns derived from neuroimaging in the future should offer some novel insights. Recent evidence already demonstrates a significant relationship between brain surface and genetics in humans in a collaborative cross-laboratory dataset of more than 50,000 participants ( Grasby et al, 2020 ) as well as its distribution over the brain ( Valk et al, 2020 ). Extending genetic brain imaging MRI to other primates will not only validate this work but also shed light on the main brain surface evolutionary mechanisms.…”

Combining local and global evolutionary trajectories of brain-behavior equilibrium through game theory

“…A more recent field of investigation is network neuroscience, which basically employs functional connectivity between brain subunits to model brain subsystems (Bassett and Sporns, 2017). Network neuroscience traditionally involves the analysis of co-activated regions (Hutchinson et al, 2013) but can also include other aspects of the brain, such as structural covariance (Anderson-Bloch and Finlay, 2013) or genomic patterns (Conaco et al, 2012;Valk et al, 2020).…”