Li Yue, Sun Qinyao, Zhu Shunli, Chu Congying, Wang Jiaojian
State Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research, Institute of Primate Translational Medicine, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China.
School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
Elife. 2024 Dec 9;13:e96020. doi: 10.7554/eLife.96020.
Disentangling the evolution mysteries of the human brain has always been an imperative endeavor in neuroscience. Although many previous comparative studies revealed genetic, brain structural and connectivity distinctness between human and other nonhuman primates, the brain evolutional mechanism is still largely unclear. Here, we proposed to embed the brain anatomy of human and macaque in the developmental chronological axis to construct cross-species predictive model to quantitatively characterize brain evolution using two large public human and macaque datasets. We observed that applying the trained models within-species could well predict the chronological age. Interestingly, we found the model trained in macaque showed a higher accuracy in predicting the chronological age of human than the model trained in human in predicting the chronological age of macaque. The cross-application of the trained model introduced an individual brain cross-species age gap index to quantify the cross-species discrepancy along the temporal axis of brain development and was found to be associated with the behavioral performance in visual acuity test and picture vocabulary test in human. Taken together, our study situated the cross-species brain development along the chronological axis, which highlighted the disproportionately anatomical development in human brain to extend our understanding of the potential evolutionary effects.
解开人类大脑的进化之谜一直是神经科学领域的一项紧迫任务。尽管此前许多比较研究揭示了人类与其他非人类灵长类动物在基因、大脑结构和连通性方面的差异，但大脑的进化机制仍 largely不清楚。在这里，我们提议将人类和猕猴的大脑解剖结构嵌入发育时间轴，以构建跨物种预测模型，利用两个大型公开的人类和猕猴数据集来定量表征大脑进化。我们观察到，在物种内应用训练好的模型可以很好地预测实际年龄。有趣的是，我们发现，在猕猴中训练的模型在预测人类实际年龄方面比在人类中训练的模型在预测猕猴实际年龄方面具有更高的准确性。训练模型的交叉应用引入了个体大脑跨物种年龄差距指数，以量化沿大脑发育时间轴的跨物种差异，并且发现该指数与人类视力测试和图片词汇测试中的行为表现相关。综上所述，我们的研究将跨物种大脑发育置于时间轴上，突出了人类大脑不成比例的解剖学发育，以扩展我们对潜在进化影响的理解。
