The heritability of multi-modal connectivity in human brain activity
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- University of Warwick, United Kingdom
- Washington University in St. Louis, United States
Abstract
Patterns of intrinsic human brain activity exhibit a profile of functional connectivity that is associated with behaviour and cognitive performance, and deteriorates with disease. This paper investigates the relative importance of genetic factors and the common environment between twins in determining this functional connectivity profile. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 820 subjects from the Human Connectome Project, and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings from a subset, the heritability of connectivity between 39 cortical regions was estimated. On average over all connections, genes account for about 15% of the observed variance in fMRI connectivity (and about 10% in alpha-band and 20% in beta-band oscillatory power synchronisation), which substantially exceeds the contribution from the environment shared between twins. Therefore, insofar as twins share a common upbringing, it appears that genes, rather than the developmental environment, play a dominant role in determining the coupling of neuronal activity.
Data availability
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The Human Connectome Project HCP500 data releaseOpen access dataset available from ConnectomeDB (https://db.humanconnectome.org/app/template/Login.vm). Account registration is required and access to certain data elements such as family structure is subject to restricted use terms (please see http://www.humanconnectome.org/study/hcp-young-adult/data-use-terms).
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The Human Connectome Project MEG2 data releaseOpen access dataset available from ConnectomeDB (https://db.humanconnectome.org/app/template/Login.vm). Account registration is required and access to certain data elements such as family structure is subject to restricted use terms (please see http://www.humanconnectome.org/study/hcp-young-adult/data-use-terms).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Research Councils UK (Digital Economy Programme (EP/G036861/1 Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Innovation))
- Giles L Colclough
Wellcome (106183/Z/14/Z)
- Mark W Woolrich
Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq 211534/2013-7)
- Anderson M Winkler
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/L023067)
- Stamatios N Sotiropoulos
National Institutes of Health (R01EB015611-01)
- Thomas E Nichols
National Institute for Health Research (NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre)
- Mark W Woolrich
Medical Research Council (MRC UK MEG Partnership Grant (MR/K005464/1))
- Giles L Colclough
- Mark W Woolrich
Wellcome (100309/Z/12/Z)
- Stephen M Smith
National Institutes of Health (NRSA fellowship (F30-MH097312))
- Matthew F Glasser
National Institutes of Health (1U54MH091657)
- David C Van Essen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: HCP data were acquired using protocols approved by the Washington University institutional review board. Informedconsent was obtained from subjects. Anonymised data are publicly available from ConnectomeDB (db.humanconnectome.org; Hodge et al. (2016)). Certain parts of the dataset used in this study, such as the family structures of the subjects, are available subject to restricted data usage terms, requiring researchers to ensure that the anonymity of subjects is protected (Van Essen et al., 2013).
Copyright
© 2017, Colclough et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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The heritability of multi-modal connectivity in human brain activity
eLife 6:e20178.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20178
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