Population neuroscience

Adolescent brain undergoes critical development, and deviations from normal trajectory of brain development precede manifestations of many health problems many years later. Twins studies have shown that heritability of brain structures are phase dependent, but genetic variants associated with adolescent brain is yet to be uncovered. Factors contributing to individual variations of trajectories of brain development during adolescence, such as genetic factors, or environmental factors, or interactions between them, would be informative for pathology of illnesses, as well as maturation of cognition, personality, and behaviour. Any finding discovered in human population would also be translated into animal models to bring new insights at molecular level. Finally, molecular mechanisms identified in animal models may be translated back into human studies. In this way, we are aiming at discovery of biological basis for health conditions, especially psychiatric disorders, obesity, substance use, etc., and also develop new prevention and treatment approaches for these conditions.

Data avaliability: IMAGEN data are available by application to consortium coordinator Dr G. Schumann (http://imagen-europe.com) after evaluation according to an established procedure.

• Ruan, H., Y. Zhou, Q. Luo(*), G. H. Robert, S. Desrivières, E. B. Quinlan, Z. Liu, T. Banaschewski, A. L. W. Bokde, U. Bromberg, C. Büchel, H. Flor, V. Frouin, H. Garavan, P. Gowland, A. Heinz, B. Ittermann, J.-L. Martinot, M.-L. P. Martinot, F. Nees, D. P. Orfanos, L. Poustka, S. Hohmann, J. H. Fröhner, M. N. Smolka, H. Walter, R. Whelan, F. Li, G. Schumann and J. Feng (2019). "Adolescent binge drinking disrupts normal trajectories of brain functional organization and personality maturation." NeuroImage: Clinical 22: 101804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2019.101804. (Code for main algorithms; IMAGEN data)
• Lingli Zhang (#), Qiang Luo (#,*), et al., Sylvane Desrivières(#), Fei Li (*), Jianfeng Feng(*), Frontopolar grey matter volume mediates both genetic and environmental influences on overweight and obesity, under review, 2018. (SPSS, Freesurfer, SPM, Matlab toolbox, R packages; IMAGEN data)
• Qiang Luo, Qiang Chen, Wenjia Wang, et al., Gunter Schumann, Jianfeng Feng, the IMAGEN consortium, Association of a Schizophrenia-Risk Nonsynonymous Variant With Putamen Volume in Adolescents: A Voxelwise and Genome-Wide Association Study, JAMA Psychiatry. 2019.1.16 published online.