Network organization of co-opetitive genetic influences on morphologies of the human cerebral cortex

Abstract

Brain can be represented as a network, where regions are the nodes and relations between the regions are edges. Within a network, co-existence of cooperative and competitive relationships between different nodes is called coopetition. Inter-regional genetic influences on morphological phenotypes (cortical thickness, surface area) of cortex display such coopetitive relationships. Here, we have represented these genetic influences as a network and shown that cooperative and competitive genetic influences on cortical morphological phenotypes follow distinct organization principles. Utilizing the theory of structural balance, we have shown that the pattern of collective regulation of cortical morphological phenotypes by cooperative and competitive genetic influences are overall bilaterally symmetric and such patterns of collective genetic regulation are similar to the principal modes of population variation of cortical morphological phenotypes. Finally, we have observed that the maximally and minimally imbalanced regions corresponding to the collective genetic regulation partially overlap with the cortical structural network hubs.