Neuroimaging genetics of oxytocin: A transcriptomics-informed systematic review

The last couple of decades have witnessed a rapid accumulation of studies implicating oxytocin (OT) in several neurobiological underpinnings of human behaviour and their impairment in psychiatric illness. Specifically, a neuroimaging genetics approach is helping elucidate the impact of variations in OT pathway genes on the human brain. In this review, we provide the first systematic account and discussion of all previous findings arising from human neuroimaging (epi)genetic studies of OT-related genes. To improve our mechanistic interpretation of such findings, we used data from the Genotype-Tissue Expression project to explore the functional impact the genetic variations may have on the human transcriptome. As a result, we provide an up-to-date summary of brain circuits found to be impacted by OT-relevant (epi)genetic variability, map brain pathways linking OT genes to disease, and highlight several (epi)genetic factors that modulate brain responses to intranasal OT. Finally, we provide some suggestions we believe might improve future research in the field.