These findings confirm that brain function differences observed in the group of infants at risk are not driven by overt differences in visual scanning of social scenes.
After an independent assessment of obsessive compulsive symptom-related differences across the whole brain in discordant high low and concordant-high versus concordant-low twins, we performed an additional region of interest analysis to directly compare functional brain activation differences observed in both types of twin contrasts.
Probe cg09090376, mapping to the first intron of DEPDC7 and ranked eighth in our discordant twin analysis, also exhibited significant differences in the postmortem brain samples consistent with differences observed in buccal cells from the discordant MZ twin pairs (average β difference =.03, p =.03).
Duration of illness, which was not taken into account may have been another factor in the differences observed in brain structure, one recent study of anorexia nervosa found no difference on brain structure between 'short' and 'long' duration of illness [ 4], whereas another recent VBM study found normalisation of brain regions on recovery [ 36].
The identification of altered gene expression profiles with microarrays is best viewed as the first step in the determination of potential disease-associated genes; however, the false-positive rate can be high, particularly with small sample sets and in view of the typically small differences observed in brain expression studies.
In other words, the individual differences observed in brain responses across the group of infants were not simply a reflection of their differences in global attention.
But new study in Science Advances was able to look into the brains of surgeons, and determine who was an expert and who was still learning, based on differences observed in the brain activity.
Thus, in the present study, even if an effect of ontogenic stage cannot be completely excluded, it appears unlikely that differences observed in fish brain could be explained by the life stage of fish.
Thus, the sex differences observed in teleost brains may be due primarily to the activational influences of steroid hormones [ 158], which may also explain the brain sexual lability of teleost fishes.
Tissue composition is also likely to be contributing to the differences observed, particularly in brain, an organ with very complex tissue architecture, where we and others [ 43] were unable to detect significant differences between XX and XO mice by microarray, even though a high proportion of genes on the X chromosome are highly expressed in this tissue [ 1].
