Publication Date:
2015-07-04
Description:
Larger brains tend to have more folded cortices, but what makes the cortex fold has remained unknown. We show that the degree of cortical folding scales uniformly across lissencephalic and gyrencephalic species, across individuals, and within individual cortices as a function of the product of cortical surface area and the square root of cortical thickness. This relation is derived from the minimization of the effective free energy associated with cortical shape according to a simple physical model, based on known mechanisms of axonal elongation. This model also explains the scaling of the folding index of crumpled paper balls. We discuss the implications of this finding for the evolutionary and developmental origin of folding, including the newfound continuum between lissencephaly and gyrencephaly, and for pathologies such as human lissencephaly.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Mota, Bruno -- Herculano-Houzel, Suzana -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Jul 3;349(6243):74-7. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa9101.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Instituto de Fisica, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ; Instituto de Ciencias Biomedicas, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Instituto Nacional de Neurociencia Translacional, INCT/MCT, Sao Paulo, Brazil. suzanahh@gmail.com.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26138976" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Cell Count
;
*Cerebral Cortex/cytology/embryology/pathology
;
Humans
;
Lissencephaly/*pathology
;
Mice
;
Models, Neurological
;
Neurons/*cytology/pathology
;
Rats
;
Species Specificity
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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