Virtual fMRI brown bag: January 8, 2021

Please join us for a talk given by Xiang-Zhen Kong, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at Zhejiang University.

Time: 10:10-11:00am

Place: Zoom - TBA

Mapping Brain Asymmetry in Health and Disease via the ENIGMA and UK Biobank

Left–right asymmetry of the human brain is one of its cardinal features, and also a complex, multivariate trait. Decades of research have suggested that brain asymmetry may be altered in psychiatric disorders. However, findings have been inconsistent and often based on small sample sizes. There are also open questions surrounding which structures are asymmetrical on average in the healthy population, and what are the genetic‐developmental mechanisms of the brain asymmetry. In the last 5 years, we, the ENIGMA‐Laterality Working Group, have published six large-scale studies (N = ~ 3,500 to 17,000) of human brain asymmetry in health and disease through the ENIGMA consortium. Recently, we also mapped the brain asymmetry in the UK Biobank (N = ~40,000), and ran genome-wide association scans of brain asymmetry for exploring the genetic basis. In this talk, I will briefly go through a couple of these projects, and focus on gray matter morphological asymmetry.