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Large-scale neuroimaging charts how the organization of the functional connectome changes across the human lifespan.
We thank Lianglong Sun for sharing the research, the thinking behind the discovery, and the challenges and decisions that shaped the work with the Biolà community.
PAPERS & REFERENCES
Nature NeuroscienceEVENT MATERIALS
On June 8, 2025, at 10:00 AM Beijing Time, Biolà hosted the 12th issue of the Bioneer First-Author Forum, featuring Lianglong Sun, a PhD student in Professor Yong He’s group at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University. As the first author of the featured study, Sun presented “Human Lifespan Changes in the Brain’s Functional Connectome,” published in Nature Neuroscience in 2025.
To characterize how functional brain organization changes across the human lifespan, Sun and colleagues assembled task-free functional and structural MRI data from 33,250 individuals across 132 sites, spanning from 32 weeks of postmenstrual age to 80 years. The study identified nonlinear developmental trajectories in global functional connectivity, with distinct inflection points in the mean and variance of the connectome, and constructed a fine-grained suite of lifespan brain atlases to characterize system-specific maturation.
The analyses further revealed that different functional systems mature along distinct timelines and that lifespan changes in regional connectivity follow a spatiotemporal cortical axis, progressing from primary sensorimotor regions toward higher-order association cortex. Together, these findings provide a large-scale normative framework for understanding the development and aging of the human functional connectome, with potential applications for quantifying individual variation in neurodevelopmental, aging-related, and neuropsychiatric conditions.
We sincerely thank Lianglong Sun for sharing the findings and research process behind this large-scale lifespan connectome study with the Biolà community, and for discussing how population neuroimaging can help reveal the developmental organization of human brain networks.
Citation: Sun, L., Zhao, T., Liang, X., Xia, M., Li, Q., Liao, X., Gong, G., Wang, Q., Pang, C., Yu, Q., Bi, Y., Chen, P., Chen, R., Chen, Y., Chen, T., Cheng, J., Cheng, Y., Cui, Z., Dai, Z., … He, Y. (2025). Human lifespan changes in the brain’s functional connectome. Nature Neuroscience, 28(4), 891–901. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-01907-4