The primary goal of the project is to explore how genetics associate with different types of brain connectivity and further explore whether we could find the genetic bases for the coupling of different brain connectivity. Brain imaging genetics, which studies the relationship between genetic alternation and brain structural or functional variation, becomes an emerging and rapidly growing research field in recent years Compared with the traditional behavior outcomes, imaging quantitative traits have distinct advantages to capture neurological etiology and have yielded prominent new findings in studying both psychiatric disorders and healthy population. Among different types of brain imaging characteristics, twin studies have found that brain network features are highly heritable. However, the primary strategy to handle network data is to independently analyze the individual connection between each pair of nodes, which completely ignores the topographic information within the network, leading to a loss of analytical power. Therefore, it is urgent to develop more comprehensive and powerful analytical approaches that are able to handle network-variate responses. Meanwhile, with a growing literature on network coupling, i.e. the agreement between different types of connectome, it is desired to further investigate the genetic signature of this new trait. After constructing the analytical framework, we can further implement it on the coupling response. We hope initial stage of the project will last for two years, and we will continue with more exploration after data. Through the project, we will provide a more accurate dissection of genetic bases on brain structural, functional connectome, and the genetic dissection on the connectome coupling. More importantly, we will develop an analytical pipeline for general brain network to genetic assocation use that will be released to general public.
