Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

Amidst a steady flow of upbeat research news in the behavioral-genetics literature, there are many inconvenient, uncomfortable, party-pooping sentiments that are more often left unspoken.  I mean, its a big jump – from gene to behavior – and just too easy to spoil the mood by reminding your colleagues that, “well, everything is connected to everything” or “that gene association holds only for that particular task“.  Such may have been the case often times in the past decade when the so-called imaging-genetics literature emerged to parse out a role for genetic variation in the structure and functional activation of the brain using various neuroimaging methods.  Sure, the 5HTT-LPR was associated with amygdala activation during a face matching task, but what about other tasks (and imaging modalities) and other brain regions that express this gene.  How could anyone (let alone NIMH) make sense out of all of those – not to mention the hundreds of other candidate genes poised for imaging-genetic research?

With this in mind, it is a pleasure to meet the spoiler-of-spoilers! Here is a research article that examines a few candidate genetic polymorphisms and compares their findings across multiple imaging modalities.  In his article, “Neural Connectivity as an Intermediate Phenotype: Brain Networks Under Genetic Control” [doi: 10.1002/hbm.20639] Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg examines the DARPP32, 5HTT and MAOA genes and asks whether their associations with aspects of brain structure/function are in any way consistent across different neuroimaging modalities.  Amazingly, the answer seems to be, yes.

For example, he finds that the DARPP32 associations are consistently associated with the striatum and prefrontal-striatal connectivity – even as the data were collected using voxel-based morphometry, fMRI in separate tasks, and an analysis of functional connectivity.  Similarly, both the 5HTT and MAOA gene promoter repeats also showed consistent findings within a medial prefrontal and amygdala circuit across these various modalities.

This type of finding – if it holds up to the spoilers & party poopers – could radically simplify the understanding of how genes influence cognitive function and behavior.  As suggested by Meyer-Lindenberg, “features of connectivity often better account for behavioral effects of genetic variation than regional parameters of activation or structure.”  He suggests that dynamic causal modeling of resting state brain function may be a powerful approach to understand the role of a gene in a rather global, brain-wide sort of way.  I hope so and will be following this cross-cutting “connectivity” approach in much more detail!

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