A connectional hub in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex links areas of emotion and cognitive control
- McLean Hospital / Harvard Medical School, United States
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
- University of Rochester School of Medicine, United States
- Massachusetts General Hospital, United States
Abstract
We investigated afferent inputs from all areas in the frontal cortex (FC) to different subregions in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). Using retrograde tracing in macaque monkeys, we quantified projection strength by counting retrogradely labeled cells in each FC area. The projection from different FC regions varied across injection sites in strength, following different spatial patterns. Importantly, a site at the rostral end of the cingulate sulcus stood out as having strong inputs from many areas in diverse FC regions. Moreover, it was at the integrative conjunction of three projection trends across sites. This site marks a connectional hub inside the rACC that integrates FC inputs across functional modalities. Tractography with monkey diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) located a similar hub region comparable to the tracing result. Applying the same tractography method to human dMRI data, we demonstrated that a similar hub can be located in the human rACC.
Data availability
All data analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. FreeSurfer label files have been provided for Figure 8A.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Mental Health (MH106435)
- Wei Tang
- Ziyi Zhu
- Julia F Lehman
- Suzanne N Haber
National Institute of Mental Health (MH045573)
- Wei Tang
- Ziyi Zhu
- Julia F Lehman
- Suzanne N Haber
Medical Research Council (MR/L009013/1)
- Saad Jbabdi
National Institute of Mental Health (U01-MH109589)
- Michiel Cottaar
NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research (U01-MH093765)
- Giorgia Grisot
- Anastasia Yendiki
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All nonhuman primate experiments were performed in accordance with the Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and approved by the University Committee on Animal Resources at University of Rochester (Protocol Number UCAR-2008-122R).
Human subjects: The human data were obtained from the publicly available Human Connectome Project database. All procedures conformed to ethical standards approved by the Institutional Review Board of Partners Healthcare. All human subjects have provided written informed consent.
Copyright
© 2019, Tang 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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A connectional hub in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex links areas of emotion and cognitive control
eLife 8:e43761.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43761
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