School of Medicine Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-26-2017
Abstract
Patterns of intrinsic human brain activity exhibit a profile of functional connectivity that is associated with behaviour and cognitive performance, and deteriorates with disease. This paper investigates the relative importance of genetic factors and the common environment between twins in determining this functional connectivity profile. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 820 subjects from the Human Connectome Project, and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings from a subset, the heritability of connectivity among 39 cortical regions was estimated. On average over all connections, genes account for about 15% of the observed variance in fMRI connectivity (and about 10% in alpha-band and 20% in beta-band oscillatory power synchronisation), which substantially exceeds the contribution from the environment shared between twins. Therefore, insofar as twins share a common upbringing, it appears that genes, rather than the developmental environment, have the dominant role in determining the coupling of neuronal activity.
Recommended Citation
Colclough, G. L., Smith, S. M., Nichols, T. E., Winkler, A. M., Sotiropoulos, S. N., Glasser, M. F., Van Essen, D. C., & Woolrich, M. W. (2017). The heritability of multi-modal connectivity in human brain activity. eLife, 6, e20178. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20178
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
eLife
DOI
10.7554/eLife.20178
Academic Level
faculty
Mentor/PI Department
Office of Human Genetics
Comments
Copyright © 2017, Colclough et al