Dynamical consequences of regional heterogeneity in the brain’s transcriptional landscape

2021/07/14 by Gustavo Deco, Morten L. Kringelbach, Aurina Arnatkevičiūtė +5 · 1 voice · 7 citations
Neuroscience · #Functional Brain Connectivity Studies #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research

paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/sciadv.abf4752

openalex publication_date 2021/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Brain regions vary in their molecular and cellular composition, but how this heterogeneity shapes neuronal dynamics is unclear. Here, we investigate the dynamical consequences of regional heterogeneity using a biophysical model of whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dynamics in humans. We show that models in which transcriptional variations in excitatory and inhibitory receptor (E:I) gene expression constrain regional heterogeneity more accurately reproduce the spatiotemporal structure of empirical functional connectivity estimates than do models constrained by global gene expression profiles or MRI-derived estimates of myeloarchitecture. We further show that regional transcriptional heterogeneity is essential for yielding both ignition-like dynamics, which are thought to support conscious processing, and a wide variance of regional-activity time scales, which supports a broad dynamical range. We thus identify a key role for E:I heterogeneity in generating complex neuronal dynamics and demonstrate the viability of using transcriptomic data to constrain models of large-scale brain function.

Citations

• Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis

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Discussions

• Features such as E:I have already been shown to modulate large-scale brain activity (doi.org/10.1126/scia...), but here, we wondered about intrinsic properties. While E:I ratio defines the "communicat [bsky, 3 points, 1 comments]

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