Nonhuman primate meso-circuitry data: a translational tool to understand brain networks across species

The foundation for understanding brain connections and related psychiatric diseases lies in human and animal circuitry studies. In rodents and nonhuman primates (NHPs), axonal tracing methods provide the ground-truth connectivity information of brain circuits, coupled with the ability to experimentally manipulate them when combined with other methods. In humans, neuroimaging approaches have taken the lead for studying connectivity patterns in vivo and the changes in network profiles associated with disease. To integrate knowledge from animal models and humans, a critical question is how similar the animal brains and circuits are to the humans’. In this review, we demonstrate the use of meso-circuitry information from tracing studies in NHPs to understand common network connections across species. We show that the meso-circuitry information help establish homologies of cortical and striatal regions and fiber pathways between rodents and NHPs, facilitate the translation of connections that are detailed in animal models to humans, and can locate critical hubs in large-scale brain networks. This review combines anatomic studies across animal models and imaging studies across NHPs and humans to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the hard-wired connectivity that underlies neuroimaging-derived brain networks.