名古屋大学の本田直樹教授に、遺伝子と脳コネクトミクスをつなげる数理モデル研究について、以下リンクの論文で発表された研究を中心にご講演いただきます。
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.30.651442v1.abstract

Presentator: Honda Naoki (Nagoya University)

Date: 2025/12/10 Wed 14:30-16:30 (JST)

Place: Zoom

Title: Revisiting Sperry in the Age of Connectomics: Genetic Rules of Brain-Wide Wiring

Abstract: Understanding how brain-wide neural circuits are genetically organized remains one of the fundamental challenges in neuroscience. Roger Sperry’s classical chemoaffinity theory proposed that molecular gradients provide positional cues for axonal wiring, yet its application has been largely limited to localized sensory systems. Here, we introduce SPERRFY (Spatial Positional Encoding for Reconstructing Rules of axonal Fiber connectivitY), a data-driven framework to examine whether Sperry’s concept can be generalized to the entire brain. By integrating mesoscale connectomic data with spatial transcriptomic maps from the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas, SPERRFY applies canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to identify latent correlated structures between gene-expression and connectivity spaces, thereby inferring positional gradients that may reflect molecular constraints underlying long-range axonal organization. This framework bridges molecular and anatomical levels of organization, providing a quantitative basis for reinterpreting Sperry’s chemoaffinity theory in the context of whole-brain connectomics.