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Humans are often tasked with making decisions about bundles of multiple items and very little is known about how the human brain aggregates, computes and represents value in such cases. We investigated how the human brain evaluates consumer items, both individually and in bundles, and how this activity relates to choice behavior. Participants underwent a deep-fMRI scanning protocol while we elicited behavioral valuations for single and bundled items. Behaviorally, we find that bundle values are sub-additively discounted compared to the sum of individual item values. Neurally, we find that the same distributed network in pre-frontal cortex computes the value of a bundle and its constituent individual items, but the value representation undergoes a normalization that actively re-scales across bundle and single item contexts. These findings suggest that generalized value regions contextually adapt within a valuation hierarchy, as opposed to utilizing an absolute value code.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.28.650827 | DOI Listing |
Clin Epigenetics
September 2025
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps University Marburg, Marburg, Germany.
Background: Work-related stress is a well-established contributor to mental health decline, particularly in the context of burnout, a state of prolonged exhaustion. Epigenetic clocks, which estimate biological age based on DNA methylation (DNAm) patterns, have been proposed as potential biomarkers of chronic stress and its impact on biological aging and health. However, their role in mediating the relationship between work-related stress, physiological stress markers, and burnout remains unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenome Biol
September 2025
Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany.
Background: Most RNA-seq datasets harbor genes with extreme expression levels in some samples. Such extreme outliers are usually treated as technical errors and are removed from the data before further statistical analysis. Here we focus on the patterns of such outlier gene expression to investigate whether they provide insights into the underlying biology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Aging
September 2025
Aging Biomarker Consortium (ABC), Beijing, China.
The global surge in the population of people 60 years and older, including that in China, challenges healthcare systems with rising age-related diseases. To address this demographic change, the Aging Biomarker Consortium (ABC) has launched the X-Age Project to develop a comprehensive aging evaluation system tailored to the Chinese population. Our goal is to identify robust biomarkers and construct composite aging clocks that capture biological age, defined as an individual's physiological and molecular state, across diverse Chinese cohorts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMol Psychiatry
September 2025
Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research, McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA, USA.
Dysregulated dopaminergic signaling has been implicated in the pathophysiology of major depressive disorder (MDD) and childhood sexual abuse (CSA), but inconsistencies abound. In a multimodal PET-functional MRI study, harnessing the highly selective tracer [C]altropane, we investigated dopamine transporter availability (DAT) and resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) within reward-related regions among 112 unmedicated individuals (MDD: n = 37, MDD/CSA: n = 18; CSA no MDD: n = 14; controls: n = 43). Striatal DAT and seed-based rsFC were assessed in the dorsal and ventral striatum and the ventral tegmental area.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Genet
September 2025
Institute of Medical Genetics and Applied Genomics, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Despite advances in genomic diagnostics, the majority of individuals with rare diseases remain without a confirmed genetic diagnosis. The rapid emergence of advanced omics technologies, such as long-read genome sequencing, optical genome mapping and multiomic profiling, has improved diagnostic yield but also substantially increased analytical and interpretational complexity. Addressing this complexity requires systematic multidisciplinary collaboration, as recently demonstrated by targeted diagnostic workshops.
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