Comparative Analysis of Brain Connectivity and Gene Expression Divergence in Chimpanzees and Humans

COEX 

Anatomical connectivity changes during evolution may underlie functional specialization of the human brain (Thiebaut de Schotten et al. 2022). Although chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are crucial as a comparative reference for investigating human brain evolution (Varki et al. 2005), comprehensive connectional analyses between human and chimpanzee brains have been limited due to lack of comparable cross-species brain atlases. Moreover, the underlying genetic association of human-specific brain connectivity also remains unclear. To address these questions, we built the Chimpanzee Brainnetome Atlas (ChimpBNA), investigated cross-species connectivity divergence and examined the associated genetic factors.