Network organization of coopetitive genetic influences on cortical morphologies

TL;DR

This study models the genetic influences on cortical morphology as a network of coopetitive relationships, revealing distinct organizational principles and symmetry in genetic regulation patterns across the brain.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based framework to analyze cooperative and competitive genetic influences on cortical morphology, highlighting their distinct organization and symmetry.

Findings

Genetic influences form a bilaterally symmetric network pattern.

Patterns of genetic regulation resemble principal modes of cortical variation.

Imbalanced regions overlap with cortical network hubs.

Abstract

Brain can be represented as a network, where regions are the nodes and relations between the regions are edges. Within a network, co-existence of cooperative and competitive relationships between different nodes is called coopetition. Inter-regional genetic influences on morphological phenotypes (cortical thickness, surface area) of cortex display such coopetitive relationships. Here, we have represented these genetic influences as a network and shown that cooperative and competitive genetic influences on cortical morphological phenotypes follow distinct organization principles. Utilizing the theory of structural balance, we have shown that the pattern of collective regulation of cortical morphological phenotypes by cooperative and competitive genetic influences are overall bilaterally symmetric and such patterns of collective genetic regulation are similar to the principal modes of population variation of cortical morphological phenotypes. Finally, we have observed that the maximally and minimally imbalanced regions corresponding to the collective genetic regulation partially overlap with the cortical structural network hubs.