ArticleFrontiers in neuroanatomy2015
When larger brains do not have more neurons: increased numbers of cells are compensated by decreased average cell size across mouse individuals.
Article in Frontiers in neuroanatomy, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pre- and Postnatal Ontogeny of Brain Size in Beluga and Bowhead Whales.Brain, behavior and evolution · 2026Article
- Homing and feral pigeons differ in hippocampal formation neuron size: a Golgi study.Brain structure & function · 2025Article
- Cellular Composition of the Brain of a Northern Minke Whale.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Larger Fish Have Larger Brains With More Neurons Across but Not Within Cohorts Raised in Different Growth Conditions.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Evolution of cellular architecture and function of the hippocampus: insights from the artificial selection experiment.Biology letters · 2025Article
- The meso-connectomes of mouse, marmoset, and macaque: network organization and the emergence of higher cognition.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Review
- Neuronal composition of processing modules in human V1: laminar density for neuronal and non-neuronal populations and a comparison with macaque.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- A single-cell map of antisense oligonucleotide activity in the brain.Nucleic acids research · 2023Article
- The relative sizes of nuclei in the oculomotor complex vary by order and behaviour in birds.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Article
- A single-cell map of antisense oligonucleotide activity in the brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Linking individual differences in human primary visual cortex to contrast sensitivity around the visual field.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Neuronal and non-neuronal scaling across brain regions within an intercross of domestic and wild chickens.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2022Article
- A quantitative analysis of cerebellar anatomy in birds.Brain structure & function · 2021Article
- Effects of Brain Size on Adult Neurogenesis in Shrews.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- AInsects · 2021Review
- Individual and age-related variation of cellular brain composition in a squamate reptile.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Similar Microglial Cell Densities across Brain Structures and Mammalian Species: Implications for Brain Tissue Function.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- The evolution of brain structure captured in stereotyped cell count and cell type distributions.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2020Review
- Individual and social factors affecting the ability of American crows to solve and master a string pulling task.Ethology : formerly Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie · 2020Article
- Artificial selection on brain size leads to matching changes in overall number of neurons.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is a strong trend toward increased brain size in mammalian evolution, with larger brains composed of more and larger neurons than smaller brains across species within each mammalian order. Does the evolution of increased numbers of brain neurons, and thus larger brain size, occur simply through the selection of individuals with more and larger neurons, and thus larger brains, within a population? That is, do individuals with larger brains also have more, and larger, neurons than individuals with smaller brains, such that allometric relationships across species are simply an extension of intraspecific scaling? Here we show that this is not the case across adult male mice of a similar age. Rather, increased numbers of neurons across individuals are accompanied by increased numbers of other cells and smaller average cell size of both types, in a trade-off that explains how increased brain mass does not necessarily ensue. Fundamental regulatory mechanisms thus must exist that tie numbers of neurons to numbers of other cells and to average cell size within individual brains. Finally, our results indicate that changes in brain size in evolution are not an extension of individual variation in numbers of neurons, but rather occur through step changes that must simultaneously increase numbers of neurons and cause cell size to increase, rather than decrease.
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