Imaging transcriptomics: Convergent cellular, transcriptomic, and molecular neuroimaging signatures in the healthy adult human brain

The integration of transcriptomic and neuroimaging data, “imaging transcriptomics,” has recently emerged to generate hypotheses about potential biological pathways underlying regional variability in neuroimaging features. However, the validity of this approach is yet to be examined in depth. Here, we sought to bridge this gap by performing transcriptomic decoding of the regional distribution of well-known molecular markers spanning different elements of the biology of the healthy human brain. Imaging transcriptomics identifies biological and cell pathways that are consistent with the known biology of a wide range of molecular neuroimaging markers. The extent to which it can capture patterns of gene expression that align well with elements of the biology of the neuroinflammatory axis, at least in healthy controls without a proinflammatory challenge, is inconclusive. Imaging transcriptomics might constitute an interesting approach to improve our understanding of the biological pathways underlying regional variability in a wide range of neuroimaging phenotypes. [Display omitted] •Imaging transcriptomics recovers plausible correlates of several neuroimaging markers•Its use to capture the neuroimmune axis in the healthy brain remains inconclusive•This approach might help to dissect regional variability in neuroimaging findings Martins et al. investigated whether “imaging transcriptomics” can recover biological correlates for a range of benchmark molecular imaging markers in the healthy human brain. Their data support the value of this integrative approach to improving our understanding of the biological pathways underlying regional variability in neuroimaging features.