The individuality of shape asymmetries of the human cerebral cortex
- Monash University, Australia
- Yale University, United States
- University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract
Asymmetries of the cerebral cortex are found across diverse phyla and are particularly pronounced in humans, with important implications for brain function and disease. However, many prior studies have confounded asymmetries due to size with those due to shape. Here, we introduce a novel approach to characterize asymmetries of the whole cortical shape, independent of size, across different spatial frequencies using magnetic resonance imaging data in three independent datasets. We find that cortical shape asymmetry is highly individualized and robust, akin to a cortical fingerprint, and identifies individuals more accurately than size-based descriptors, such as cortical thickness and surface area, or measures of inter-regional functional coupling of brain activity. Individual identifiability is optimal at coarse spatial scales (~37 mm wavelength), and shape asymmetries show scale-specific associations with sex and cognition, but not handedness. While unihemispheric cortical shape shows significant heritability at coarse scales (~65 mm wavelength), shape asymmetries are determined primarily by subject-specific environmental effects. Thus, coarse-scale shape asymmetries are highly personalized, sexually dimorphic, linked to individual differences in cognition, and are primarily driven by stochastic environmental influences.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript. All code and dependent toolboxes used in this study can be found at: https://github.com/cyctbdbw/Shape-Asymmetry-Signature. The code of shape-DNA can be found at: http://reuter.mit.edu/software/shapedna/. The OASIS-3 dataset is available under https://www.oasis-brains.org/. The ADNI dataset is available under https://adni.loni.usc.edu. The HCP dataset is available under https://db.humanconnectome.org/.
-
OASIS-3: Longitudinal Neuroimaging, Clinical, and Cognitive Dataset for Normal Aging and Alzheimer Disease.https://doi.org/10.1101/2019.12.13.19014902.
-
The WU-Minn Human Connectome Project: an overview.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.05.041.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Sylvia and Charles Viertel Charitable Foundation (Senior Medical Research Fellowship)
- Alex Fornito
National Health and Medical Research Council (1197431)
- Alex Fornito
National Health and Medical Research Council (1146292)
- Alex Fornito
Australian Research Council (DP200103509)
- Alex Fornito
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: This study only involved subjects from the open-sourced datasets, and all subjects were de-identified by the datasets. Each dataset was approved by its relevant ethics committee and obtained written informed consent from each participant.
Copyright
© 2022, Chen 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.
Metrics
-
- 1,687
- views
-
- 364
- downloads
-
- 22
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
The individuality of shape asymmetries of the human cerebral cortex
eLife 11:e75056.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.75056
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Social relationships guide individual behavior and ultimately shape the fabric of society. Primates exhibit particularly complex, differentiated, and multidimensional social relationships, which form interwoven social networks, reflecting both individual social tendencies and specific dyadic interactions. How the patterns of behavior that underlie these social relationships emerge from moment-to-moment patterns of social information processing remains unclear. Here, we assess social relationships among a group of four monkeys, focusing on aggression, grooming, and proximity. We show that individual differences in social attention vary with individual differences in patterns of general social tendencies and patterns of individual engagement with specific partners. Oxytocin administration altered social attention and its relationship to both social tendencies and dyadic relationships, particularly grooming and aggression. Our findings link the dynamics of visual information sampling to the dynamics of primate social networks.
-
- Neuroscience
As the global population ages, the prevalence of neurodegenerative disorders is fast increasing. This neurodegeneration as well as other central nervous system (CNS) injuries cause permanent disabilities. Thus, generation of new neurons is the rosetta stone in contemporary neuroscience. Glial cells support CNS homeostasis through evolutionary conserved mechanisms. Upon damage, glial cells activate an immune and inflammatory response to clear the injury site from debris and proliferate to restore cell number. This glial regenerative response (GRR) is mediated by the neuropil-associated glia (NG) in Drosophila, equivalent to vertebrate astrocytes, oligodendrocytes (OL), and oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs). Here, we examine the contribution of NG lineages and the GRR in response to injury. The results indicate that NG exchanges identities between ensheathing glia (EG) and astrocyte-like glia (ALG). Additionally, we found that NG cells undergo transdifferentiation to yield neurons. Moreover, this transdifferentiation increases in injury conditions. Thus, these data demonstrate that glial cells are able to generate new neurons through direct transdifferentiation. The present work makes a fundamental contribution to the CNS regeneration field and describes a new physiological mechanism to generate new neurons.
