Modeling Transformations of Neurodevelopmental Sequences across Mammalian Species

By A. Workman, C. Charvet, Barbara Clancy, Richard B. Darlington, Barbara L. Finlay. 2013

758 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A general model of neural development is derived to fit 18 mammalian species, including humans, macaques, several rodent species, and six metatherian (marsupial) mammals. The goal of this work is to describe heterochronic changes in brain evolution within its basic developmental allometry, and provide an empirical basis to recognize equivalent maturational states across animals. The empirical data generating the model comprises 271 developmental events, including measures of initial neurogenesis, axon extension, establishment, and refinement of connectivity, as well as later events such as myelin formation, growth of brain volume, and early behavioral milestones, to the third year of human postnatal life. The progress of neural events across species is sufficiently predictable that a single model can be used to predict the timing of all events in all species, with a correlation of modeled values to empirical data of 0.9929. Each species' rate of progress through the event scale, described by a regression equation predicting duration of development in days, is highly correlated with adult brain size. Neural heterochrony can be seen in selective delay of retinogenesis in the cat, associated with greater numbers of rods in its retina, and delay of corticogenesis in all species but rodents and the rabbit, associated with relatively larger cortices in species with delay. Unexpectedly, precocial mammals (those unusually mature at birth) delay the onset of first neurogenesis but then progress rapidly through remaining developmental events.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults (2018, neutral): “Expression data were z-score normalized for each species and ages were aligned between species based on calculated event scores of conserved timing of neurodevelopmental events 35 .”
Coexpression networks implicate human midfetal deep cortical projection neurons in the pathogenesis of autism (2013, positive): “To pursue this question, we have taken a ‘‘bottom-up’’ approach to gene coexpression network analysis, focusing initially on only nine ‘‘seed’’ genes carrying multiple de novo LoFmutations and thereby showing the strongest evidence for association with ASD.”
Brain Plasticity and Human Evolution (2017, positive): “Based on the predictable sequence of neurodevelopmental events (Workman et al. 2013), it can be modeled that certain aspects of brain maturation, such as the onset of myelination of limbic, striatal, and neocortical structures, were transposed from the prenatal period to the postnatal period over…”
The Cerebellum, Sensitive Periods, and Autism (2014, background): “Experimentally, brain development in rodent pups, which closely resembles brain development in humans during the second and third trimester (Workman et al., 2013), is influenced by stress due to variation in maternal care, leading to epigenetic variation (Gudsnuk and Champagne, 2011) and long-term c”
The Cellular and Molecular Landscapes of the Developing Human Central Nervous System (2016, positive): “org [Workman et al., 2013]) to last 11 days (11 to 22 pcd) in mouse, 67 days (45 to 112 pcd) in rhesus macaque, and 143 days (48 to 191 pcd) in human.”