Biology subjects

Gau, R.

Publications and source records attributed to Gau, R..

11 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Early blindness shifts the feedforward laminar profile of hMT+/V5 from visual to auditory motion

The occipital cortex of people born blind massively enhances its response to sounds, but the brain circuitry supporting such crossmodal plasticity remains elusive. Here we capitalized on ultra-high-field fMRI (7T) coupled with sub-millimetre BOLD and VASO acquisitions to infer whether motion-related information is processed via feedforward or feedback pathways, probing responses to visual motion in sighted participants and auditory motion in both sighted and early blind individuals. By identifying circuitry from layer-dependent activity of the middle temporal cortex (hMT+/V5), we observed that moving, but not static, sounds selectively elicited a feedforward response in the middle layers of hMT+/V5 of blind people, analogous to visual motion processing in sighted individuals. Furthermore, we observed that hMT+/V5 shows enhanced auditory motion-selective connectivity with the Planum Temporale in the sighted and with the cuneus in blind people. These findings reveal that hMT+/V5 implements a feedforward motion selective response profile in sighted and blind individuals, with its sensory input shifting from vision to audition in the absence of visual experience.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

EMG-BIDS: an extension to the Brain Imaging Data Structure for electromyography

Electromyography (EMG) is fundamental to clinical assessment, rehabilitation, neuromuscular research, and human-machine interfaces. Despite decades of use, no widely adopted standard exists for organizing and sharing EMG data, limiting reusability and large-scale data aggregation. We present EMG-BIDS, an extension to the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) that standardizes the organization of EMG recordings. EMG-BIDS addresses challenges unique to EMG, including diverse electrode types (surface or intramuscular, single channel to high-density arrays), heterogeneous electrode placements across anatomical locations, montages (e.g., monopolar or bipolar sensor designs), and the critical need for transparent documentation of sensor positioning. The specification introduces hierarchical coordinate systems that link local electrode grids to anatomical landmarks, enabling precise and reproducible placement documentation. EMG-BIDS is now part of BIDS as of version 1.11.0, supported by existing tools, including MNE-BIDS and EEGLAB. We demonstrate the specification through public datasets, including high-density surface EMG recordings. EMG-BIDS provides the foundation for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) EMG data sharing, enabling meta-analyses, multi-site studies, and machine learning applications that require standardized, well-documented datasets.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Nipoppy: A framework for standardizing neuroimaging studies to facilitate international derived-data sharing

Neuroimaging data management and processing are tedious and error-prone, prompting reproducibility concerns. Globally, studies with heterogeneous infrastructure and governance policies lead to eclectic data processing and sharing, necessitating standardization of data workflows to ensure reusability and comparability of multi-centric datasets. The Nipoppy neuroinformatics framework facilitates such standardization by combining specification, protocol, and software to manage study-level data workflows. With its adoption, researchers can share standardized, derived datasets enabling efficient, reproducible, and inclusive research.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2026

Eye-Tracking-BIDS: the Brain Imaging Data Structure extended to gaze position and pupil data

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a widely adopted, community-driven standard to organize neuroimaging data and metadata. Although numerous extensions have been developed to incrementally extend coverage to new modalities and data types, an unambiguous, granular specification for eye-tracking recordings is lacking. Here, we present how BIDS will structure data and metadata produced by eye-tracking devices, including gaze position and pupil data. In addition to prescribing the organization of the unprocessed (raw) recordings and associated metadata as produced by the device, BEP20 also resolves gaps in current BIDS specifications beyond the scope of eye tracking. In particular, it adds a mechanism for including asynchronous model parameters and messages, such as contextual information, statuses, and events, such as triggers, generated by the device. BEP20 includes examples that illustrate its applicability in various experimental settings. This BIDS extension provides a robust standard that supports the development of self-adaptive, open, and automated eye-tracking data structures, thereby bolstering transparency and reliability of results in this field.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Representation of emotional expressions across the face and voice brain networks

Recognizing emotion expressions from facial and vocal signals is crucial for optimal social interactions. We comprehensively characterized regions within the face and voice processing networks to probe their contribution to unimodal and crossmodal emotion representation. Using multivariate pattern classification analyses, we found that emotional expressions could be reliably decoded from the dominant sensory modality in all individually defined face- and voice-selective regions. Emotion expressions from the non-dominant modality (vocal expressions in the face networks, and vice versa) could also be decoded in all areas except the occipital face areas. A shared neural code for facial and vocal emotions is implemented in the temporal voice areas (TVA), the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and the precentral gyrus (PCG). The simultaneous presentation of congruent facial and vocal expressions elicited distinct activity patterns across most regions, highlighting that multisensory inputs reshape brain responses relative to unisensory stimulation across the entire face and voice brain network. These findings suggest that face and voice-selective regions broadly encode emotion expressions within and even across the senses, relying on a multisensory gradient that converges in temporo-frontal regions where their distributed multisensory responses align to create a supramodal representation of specific emotion expressions.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Multifaceted brain representation of numerosity across the senses and presentation formats

Humans can extract numerosity from different senses and a variety of context. How and where the brain abstract numerical information from low-level sensory inputs remains debated. Using multivariate pattern decoding and representational similarity analysis applied to fMRI data, we comprehensively investigate how the brain represents numerical information (range 2-5) across different modalities (auditory, visual) and presentation formats (sequential, simultaneous; symbolic, non-symbolic). We identify a set of brain regions along the dorsal pathway-from early visual cortex to the intraparietal and frontal regions-that encode specific non-symbolic numerical information across formats and modalities. The numerical distance effect, a hallmark of magnitude encoding, was observed in most of these regions. We found aligned representation of numerical information across visual and auditory modalities in intraparietal and frontal regions, but only when they shared a sequential presentation format. Maintaining a distinction between spatial and temporal numerical representations may thus be a fundamental aspect of numerical processing. RSA further revealed a posterior-to-anterior gradient in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) showing that the dominant factors influencing distributed numerical representations shifted from sensory modality in the posterior parietal regions to presentation format in the anterior parietal areas. Our study reveals a multifaceted brain representation of numerosity across the senses and presentation formats.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans

How does experience shape the development of visual brain regions? We demonstrate that a transient period of visual deprivation early in life in humans leads to permanent alteration in the function of the early visual cortex (EVC), while leaving the categorical coding of downstream ventral occipito-temporal cortex (VOTC) mostly unaffected. We used fMRI to characterize the brain response to five categories (faces, bodies, objects, buildings and words) in a rare group of cataract-reversal individuals who experienced a transient period of blindness early in life, and in matched participants with typical visual development. We show that the encoding of low-level visual properties is impaired in EVC in cataract-reversal participants, while the categorical response in the VOTC is preserved. When altering the visual properties of our stimuli to mimic in controls the deficit of EVC response of the cataract, we observe a cascading alteration of the categorical coding from EVC to VOTC that is not observed in the cataract-reversal group. Our results show that a typical visual categorical organization develops in VOTC despite a period of visual deprivation early in life and in the presence of impaired processing in EVC. A deep neural network exposed to a visual diet that emulates the experience of our participants reproduced our brain observations within an artificial system. These findings emphasize how specific visual regions are differently affected by a period of visual deprivation early in life, with information encoded in EVC being permanently affected, while the categorical coding in VOTC shows resilience to deprivation.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Widespread neural reorganization related to expertise in reading visual Braille

Learning to read assigns linguistic value to an abstract visual code. Whether regions of the reading network tune to visual properties common to most scripts or code for more abstracted units of language remains debated. Here we investigate this question using visual Braille, a script developed for touch that does not share the typical explicit shape information of other alphabets, yet maps onto the same phonology and lexicon as other more regular scripts. First, we compared univariate responses in visual Braille readers and a naive control group and found that individually localized Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) was selectively activated for visual Braille when compared to scrambled Braille only in expert Braille readers. Multivariate analyses showed that linguistic properties can be decoded from Latin script in both groups and from Braille script in expert readers in an extended network of brain regions including the early visual cortex (V1), the lateral occipital region (LO), the VWFA and the left Posterior Temporal area (l-PosTemp). These results suggest that the tuning of an extended reading network to orthography relies more on the linguistic content of the script rather than their specific visual features (e.g. line junctions). Nevertheless, cross-scripts generalization was significantly lower than within-script decoding and failed to reveal common representations across Latin and Braille in experts in all regions except the l-PosTemp. These results suggest that V1, LO and VWFA encode orthographic representations in a script-specific manner, whereas l-PosTemp encodes abstracted linguistic information.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

PET-BIDS, an extension to the brain imaging data structure for positron emission tomography

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a standard for organizing and describing neuroimaging datasets. It serves not only to facilitate the process of data sharing and aggregation, but also to simplify the application and development of new methods and software for working with neuroimaging data. Here, we present an extension of BIDS to include positron emission tomography (PET) data (PET-BIDS). We describe the PET-BIDS standard in detail and share several open-access datasets curated following PET-BIDS. Additionally, we highlight several tools which are already available for converting, validating and analyzing PET-BIDS datasets.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Radiation-induced reprogramming drives glioma vascular transdifferentiation and tumor recurrence

Treatment-refractory glioma stem and tumor cells exhibit phenotypic plasticity driving recurrence, but the underlying molecular mechanisms remain to be elucidated. Here, we employed single-cell and whole transcriptomic analyses to discover that radiation induces a dynamic shift in functional states of glioma cells allowing for acquisition of vascular endothelial-like and pericyte-like cell phenotypes. These vascular-like cells provide a trophic niche to promote proliferation of irradiated glioma cells, and their selective depletion results in reduced tumor growth post-treatment in vivo. Mechanistically, the acquisition of vascular-like phenotype is driven by increased chromatin accessibility and H3K27 acetylation in specific vascular gene regions post-treatment. Blocking P300 histone acetyltransferase activity reverses the epigenetic changes induced by radiation, and inhibits the phenotypic transition and tumor growth. Our findings highlight an important role for P300 histone acetyltransferase in treatment-induced plasticity and opens a new therapeutic avenue for preventing glioma recurrence. SignificanceOur study demonstrates that radiation therapy promotes glioma resistance by inducing vascular-like phenotypes in GSC that, in turn, aid in proliferation of the remaining tumor cells. This phenotype switch is mediated by P300 HAT, and inhibition of this enzyme is a potential therapeutic target for preventing glioma recurrence following radiation.

cancer biology↗

bioRxiv2019

Resolving multisensory and attentional influences across cortical depth in sensory cortices

In our environment our senses are bombarded with a myriad of signals, only a subset of which is relevant for our goals. Using sub-millimeter-resolution fMRI at 7T we resolved BOLD-response and activation patterns across cortical depth in early sensory cortices to auditory, visual and audiovisual stimuli under auditory or visual attention. In visual cortices, auditory stimulation induced widespread inhibition irrespective of attention, whereas auditory relative to visual attention suppressed mainly central visual field representations. In auditory cortices, visual stimulation suppressed activations, but amplified responses to concurrent auditory stimuli, in a patchy topography. Critically, multisensory interactions in auditory cortices were stronger in deeper laminae, while attentional influences were greatest at the surface. These distinct depth-dependent profiles suggest that multisensory and attentional mechanisms regulate sensory processing via partly distinct circuitries. Our findings are crucial for understanding how the brain regulates information flow across senses to interact with our complex multisensory world.

neuroscience↗