Mammalian cerebral cortex

The mammalian genome is folded into complex structures giving rise to multiple layers of compaction, while still accommodating dynamic and complicated tasks such as replication, transcription, and DNA repair. It is now widely accepted that the 3-dimensional (3D) genome organization plays an important role in both establishing and maintaining stable gene expression patterns, which impacts the development of cell-type identities. The development of chromosome conformation capture (3C) technology has been crucial in the endeavor to understand the organization of the 3D genome, and various structu

The generating mechanism for the gyrification of the mammalian cerebral cortex remains a central open question in neuroscience. Although many models have been proposed over the years, very few were able to provide empirically testable predictions. In this paper, we assume a model in which the cortex folds for all species of mammals according to a simple mechanism of effective free energy minimization of a growing self-avoiding surface subjected to inhomogeneous bulk stresses to derive a new set of morphological variables to express cortical morphology. In terms of these new variables, we seek