Findings from the Rutgers Health study offer a deeper understanding of mental health conditions and cognition.
Rutgers researchers at the Brain Health Institute (BHI) and Center for Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research (CAHBIR) have uncovered how different types of brain cells work together to form large-scale functional networks in the human brain – interconnected systems that support everything from sensory processing to complex decision-making – paving the way for new insights into brain health and disease.
By pinpointing these cellular foundations, the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, offers a deeper understanding of the cellular foundations of cognition and mental health.
The brain’s functional properties arise from the varied cell types within its cortex, the outermost layer responsible for many complex mental tasks. A major goal in neuroscience research is to understand how our genetic, molecular and cellular processes support brain’s organization properties, as measured through functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Historically, scientists studied brain organization properties by examining tissue samples from post-mortem or by using invasive techniques in animals, such as studying tissue structure (histology), tracing neural pathways, measuring electrical activity (electrophysiology) or observing changes after specific areas were damaged (lesion methods).
Advances in genetics and technology now allow researchers to study how brain cells are organized in human tissue more precisely. In this study, Rutgers researchers used recently developed post-mortem gene expression atlases, which map how genes are differentially expressed across brain regions, to explore how different types of cells may spatially align with brain networks studies in the general population.