PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Alice Patania
AU  - Pierluigi Selvaggi
AU  - Mattia Veronese
AU  - Ottavia Dipasquale
AU  - Paul Expert
AU  - Giovanni Petri
TI  - Topological gene-expression networks recapitulate brain anatomy and function
AID  - 10.1101/476382
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 476382
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/25/476382.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/25/476382.full
AB  - Understanding how gene expression translates to and affects human behaviour is one of the ultimate aims of neuroscience. In this paper, we present a pipeline based on Mapper, a topological simplification tool, to produce and analyze genes co-expression data. We first validate the method by reproducing key results from the literature on the Allen Human Brain Atlas, and the correlations between resting-state fMRI and gene co-expression maps. We then analyze a dopamine-related gene-set and find that co-expression networks produced by Mapper returned a structure that matches the well-known anatomy of the dopaminergic pathway. Our results suggest that topological network descriptions can be a powerful tool to explore the relationships between genetic pathways and their association with brain function and its perturbation due to illness and/or pharmacological challenge.