Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6) and Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-6) and JARA-Institut Brain Structure-Function Relationships (INM-10), Jülich Research Centre, Wilhelm-Johnen-Str., 52428 Jülich, Germany.
Institute of Zoology, University of Cologne, Zülpicher Str., 50674 Cologne, Germany.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 Aug 8;33(16):9439-9449. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhad160.
Numbers of neurons and their spatial variation are fundamental organizational features of the brain. Despite the large corpus of cytoarchitectonic data available in the literature, the statistical distributions of neuron densities within and across brain areas remain largely uncharacterized. Here, we show that neuron densities are compatible with a lognormal distribution across cortical areas in several mammalian species, and find that this also holds true within cortical areas. A minimal model of noisy cell division, in combination with distributed proliferation times, can account for the coexistence of lognormal distributions within and across cortical areas. Our findings uncover a new organizational principle of cortical cytoarchitecture: the ubiquitous lognormal distribution of neuron densities, which adds to a long list of lognormal variables in the brain.
神经元的数量及其空间变化是大脑的基本组织特征。尽管文献中提供了大量细胞构筑学数据，但神经元密度在脑区内部和脑区之间的统计分布在很大程度上仍未得到描述。在这里，我们表明，神经元密度在几种哺乳动物的皮质区域中与对数正态分布相兼容，并且还发现这种情况在皮质区域内也是如此。一个带有分布式增殖时间的噪声细胞分裂的最小模型，可以解释对数正态分布在皮质区域内和区域之间的共存。我们的研究结果揭示了皮质细胞构筑的一个新的组织原则：神经元密度的普遍对数正态分布，这增加了大脑中许多对数正态变量的列表。
