Mapping neurotransmitter systems to the structural and functional organization of the human neocortex

By J. Hansen, G. Shafiei, Ross D. Markello, Kelly Smart, S. Cox, Yanjun Wu, J. Gallezot, É. Aumont, S. Servaes, Stephanie G. Scala and 20 more. bioRxiv, 2021

685 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neurotransmitter receptors support the propagation of signals in the human brain. How receptor systems are situated within macro-scale neuroanatomy and how they shape emergent function remain poorly understood, and there exists no comprehensive atlas of receptors. Here we collate positron emission tomography data from more than 1,200 healthy individuals to construct a whole-brain three-dimensional normative atlas of 19 receptors and transporters across nine different neurotransmitter systems. We found that receptor profiles align with structural connectivity and mediate function, including neurophysiological oscillatory dynamics and resting-state hemodynamic functional connectivity. Using the Neurosynth cognitive atlas, we uncovered a topographic gradient of overlapping receptor distributions that separates extrinsic and intrinsic psychological processes. Finally, we found both expected and novel associations between receptor distributions and cortical abnormality patterns across 13 disorders. We replicated all findings in an independently collected autoradiography dataset. This work demonstrates how chemoarchitecture shapes brain structure and function, providing a new direction for studying multi-scale brain organization. Hansen et al. compile and share an atlas of neurotransmitter receptor/transporter densities in the human cortex and show that receptor achitecture reflects brain structure, function, dynamics, cognitive specialization and disease vulnerability.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3106aeec276b4250926aa675f7963f00c690a882

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

neuromaps: structural and functional interpretation of brain maps (2022, background): “…for the right hemisphere; the intrinsic timescale is log-transformed; a selection of four of the 36 neurotransmitter receptor maps are shown here 14,61–64 ; and the genomic gradient is upsampled to the fsaverage 10k surface (for accessing raw and processed Allen Human Brain Atlas data, see…”
Heterochronous laminar maturation in the human prefrontal cortex (2025, unknown): “In accordance with prior work on functional decoding 109,110 , we created meta-analytic maps for 123 psychological terms that were both available in Neurosynth and included in the Cognitive Atlas 111 , an ontology of cognitive neuroscience concepts.”