RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Shared genetic aetiology between cognitive performance and brain activations in language and math tasks
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 386805
DO 10.1101/386805
A1 Yann Le Guen
A1 Marie Amalric
A1 Philippe Pinel
A1 Christophe Pallier
A1 Vincent Frouin
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/07/386805.abstract
AB Cognitive performance is highly heritable. However, little is known about common genetic influences on cognitive ability and brain activation when engaged in a cognitive task. The Human Connectome Project (HCP) offers a unique opportunity to study this shared genetic etiology with an extended pedigree of 785 individuals. To investigate this common genetic origin, we took advantage of the HCP dataset, which includes both language and mathematics activation tasks. Using the HCP multimodal parcellation, we identified areals in which inter-individual functional MRI (fMRI) activation variance was significantly explained by genetics. Then, we performed bivariate genetic analyses between the neural activations and behavioral scores, corresponding to the fMRI task accuracies, fluid intelligence, working memory and language performance. We observed that several parts of the language network along the superior temporal sulcus, as well as the angular gyrus belonging to the math processing network, are significantly genetically correlated with these indicators of cognitive performance. This shared genetic etiology provides insights into the brain areas where the human-specific genetic repertoire is expressed. Studying the association of polygenic risk scores, using variants associated with human cognitive ability and brain activation, would provide an opportunity to better understand where these variants are influential.