Brain-wide and cell-specific transcriptomic insights into MRI-derived cortical morphology in macaque monkeys
Tingting Bo, Jie Li, Ganlu Hu, Ge Zhang, Wei Wang, Qian Lv, Shaoling Zhao, Junjie Ma, Meng Qin, Xiaohui Yao, Meiyun Wang, Guang‐Zhong Wang, Zheng Wang
Abstract
Integrative analyses of transcriptomic and neuroimaging data have generated a wealth of information about biological pathways underlying regional variability in imaging-derived brain phenotypes in humans, but rarely in nonhuman primates due to the lack of a comprehensive anatomically-defined atlas of brain transcriptomics. Here we generate complementary bulk RNA-sequencing dataset of 819 samples from 110 brain regions and single-nucleus RNA-sequencing dataset, and neuroimaging data from 162 cynomolgus macaques, to examine the link between brain-wide gene expression and regional variation in morphometry. We not only observe global/regional expression profiles of macaque brain comparable to human but unravel a dorsolateral-ventromedial gradient of gene assemblies within the primate frontal lobe. Furthermore, we identify a set of 971 protein-coding and 34 non-coding genes consistently associated with cortical thickness, specially enriched for neurons and oligodendrocytes. These data provide a unique resource to investigate nonhuman primate models of human diseases and probe cross-species evolutionary mechanisms.