Deletion of neuroligins from astrocytes does not detectably alter synapse numbers or astrocyte cytoarchitecture by maturity.

Although the neural machinery that allows us to process sensory information is broadly conserved across people, no two individuals experience the same sensory stimulus in exactly the same way. What underlying factors give rise to this person-to-person variability in subjective experience? Recent work has established that the idiosyncratic nature of subjective experience is reflected in idiosyncratic brain responses to sensory information, and that how an individual processes a stimulus is shaped by their psychosocial background and previous experiences. For example, individuals who share more similar personality traits () and political orientations () exhibit more similar interpretations of, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses to, relevant audiovisual stimuli, as do individuals who are primed with more similar contextual information before listening to an ambiguous narrative (). Here, we extend this work by investigating a more fundamental source of variability in sensory-evoked brain responses and the experiences they represent: our genes. Whether individual variability in a given trait is due to environmental or genetic factors is a central question in biology, and the extent to which this variability is underpinned by variation in genetics is captured by heritability (or ). Recent studies have quantified the heritability of various aspects of sensory brain function, revealing a genetic basis for patterns of brain activity elicited by auditory tones and visual gratings in sensory cortices (; ; ). However, the unimodal and low-dimensional nature of these stimuli may not capture the full complexity of real-life sensory experiences and the brain responses they evoke. Consequently, the extent to which genetic factors influence brain responses to more naturalistic stimuli remains unclear, especially for high-level (e.g. social and narrative) information encoded across longer timescales in association cortex. In addition to activity patterns within individual brain areas, information can also be encoded in the functional connectivity (FC) between multiple areas or networks (; ). Research into the heritability of FC and related measures has largely focused on data acquired while subjects are at rest, during which an individual’s unique FC profile (i.e. pattern of pairwise FC strengths), describes their brain’s intrinsic functional architecture (; ; ; ; ; ; ). These studies have demonstrated that a range of resting state FC (rest FC)-derived measures are moderately heritable, and similar findings have resulted from work characterizing the heritability of FC during task performance, which additionally reflects the processing of information relevant to the task at hand (; ; ). Although this work has shed significant light on the genetic basis of FC during rest and cognition, the heritability of sensory-evoked FC patterns, which are known to encode stimulus features () and track individual differences in behavior (), has yet to be investigated.