Correlated gene expression supports synchronous activity in brain networks

By Jonas Richiardi, André Altmann, A. Milazzo, Catie Chang, M. Chakravarty, T. Banaschewski, G. Barker, A. Bokde, U. Bromberg, C. Büchel and 23 more. Science, 2015

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cooperating brain regions express similar genes When the brain is at rest, a number of distinct areas are functionally connected. They tend to be organized in networks. Richiardi et al. compared brain imaging and gene expression data to build computational models of these networks. These functional networks are underpinned by the correlated expression of a core set of 161 genes. In this set, genes coding for ion channels and other synaptic functions such as neurotransmitter release dominate. Science, this issue p. 1241 Gene expression is more similar than expected by chance in brain regions that are functionally connected. During rest, brain activity is synchronized between different regions widely distributed throughout the brain, forming functional networks. However, the molecular mechanisms supporting functional connectivity remain undefined. We show that functional brain networks defined with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging can be recapitulated by using measures of correlated gene expression in a post mortem brain tissue data set. The set of 136 genes we identify is significantly enriched for ion channels. Polymorphisms in this set of genes significantly affect resting-state functional connectivity in a large sample of healthy adolescents. Expression levels of these genes are also significantly associated with axonal connectivity in the mouse. The results provide convergent, multimodal evidence that resting-state functional networks correlate with the orchestrated activity of dozens of genes linked to ion channel activity and synaptic function.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/385514ac7a1908821811b6b662cca262bd047c78

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Citations in the corpus

Network neuroscience (2017, background): “In human cerebral cortex, transcription patterns are more similar in coherently active functional networks 126 and exhibit correlations with activity levels observed during rest 127 .”
The Human Brainnetome Atlas: A New Brain Atlas Based on Connectional Architecture (2016, neutral): “A recent study that analyzed brain imaging and gene expression data found that large-scale resting-state functional brain networks correlated with the expression of genes that code for ion channels and other synaptic functions (Richiardi et al. 2015).”
A practical guide to linking brain-wide gene expression and neuroimaging data (2018, methodology): “…to yield new insights into how regional variations in gene expression relate to functional connectivity within canonical resting-state networks (Richiardi et al., 2015; Forest et al., 2017); ﬁ ber tract connectivity be-tween brain regions (Goel et al., 2014); temporal and topological…”