Human cortex development is shaped by molecular and cellular brain systems

Human brain morphology undergoes complex changes over the lifespan. Despite recent progress in tracking brain development via normative models, current knowledge of underlying biological mechanisms is highly limited. We demonstrate that human cerebral cortex development unfolds along patterns of molecular and cellular brain organization, traceable from population-level to individual developmental trajectories. During childhood and adolescence, cortex-wide spatial distributions of dopaminergic receptors, inhibitory neurons, glial cell populations, and brain-metabolic features explain up to 50% of variance associated with regional cortical thickness trajectories. Adult cortical change patterns are best explained by cholinergic and glutamatergic neurotransmission. These relationships are supported by developmental gene expression trajectories and translate to longitudinal data from over 8,000 adolescents, explaining up to 59% of developmental change at population- and 18% at single-subject level. Integrating multilevel brain atlases with normative modeling and population neuroimaging provides a biologically meaningful path to understand typical and atypical brain development in living humans.