MIT Simons Center for the Social Brain

Chaoyi Zhang presents a method for observing distributed social-brain networks in awake marmosets during natural social interaction. Prefrontal, cingulate, striatal, thalamic and amygdala circuits are implicated in autism and other neuropsychiatric conditions, but have rarely been measured together during genuine primate social behavior. The platform replaces part of the skull with an acoustically transparent implant, enabling volumetric functional ultrasound measurements of cortical and subcortical activity at approximately 150-micrometre resolution. A whole-brain vascular reference and automated registration permit comparisons across roughly 50 atlas-defined regions, sessions and animals. Experiments show that a live social partner produces stronger and more extensive activity than video of the same partner. The talk considers applying this approach to genetically tractable, transgenic marmoset models of autism risk genes to identify altered network signatures and evaluate their potential as circuit-level biomarkers.

Tatsuya Osaki examines vascular contributions to autism spectrum disorder, focusing on blood–brain barrier integrity and cerebral blood-flow dynamics during early development. Rett syndrome provides a starting point: MeCP2 mutations impair endothelial function, suggesting that vascular cells themselves contribute to disease mechanisms. A three-dimensional microphysiological model built from human induced pluripotent stem cells recreates blood–brain barrier structure and function. Patient-derived endothelial cells form perfusable microvascular networks but show impaired barrier function, a finding independently corroborated in MeCP2-knockout mice. Transcriptomic analyses implicate increased miR-126 expression and disrupted tight junctions; inhibiting miR-126-3p restores barrier function and identifies a potential therapeutic target. The work is extending to hemodynamic changes in other autism subtypes, with two-photon imaging providing in-vivo cross-validation, to identify shared neurovascular mechanisms and candidate interventions.

Rani Borbara presents brain-wide recordings from more than 150 freely moving C. elegans to examine how anatomical connectivity becomes functional organization during behavior. Cross-animal models map cell-class conditional dependencies and test how synapses, gap junctions, neuromodulation and shared brain states shape circuit dynamics.