Researchers Say They've Recreated Part of a Rat Brain Digitally

posted by takyon on Friday October 09 2015, @03:00PM

from the I'll-slice-you-up-you-dirty-rat dept.

Cell Press is reporting on a paper published October 8, 2015 in the journal Cell, which details work done by the Blue Brain Project at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) on the digital reconstruction of a section of rat brain.

From the release:

Heroic efforts are currently being made to define all the different types of neurons in the brain, to measure their electrical firing properties, and to map out the circuits that connect them to one another. These painstaking efforts are giving us a glimpse into the building blocks and logic of brain wiring. However, getting a full, high-resolution picture of all the features and activity of the neurons within a brain region and the circuit-level behaviors of these neurons is a major challenge.
Henry Markram and colleagues have taken an engineering approach to this question by digitally reconstructing a slice of the neocortex, an area of the brain that has benefitted from extensive characterization. Using this wealth of data, they built a virtual brain slice representing the different neuron types present in this region and the key features controlling their firing and, most notably, modeling their connectivity, including nearly 40 million synapses and 2,000 connections between each brain cell type.
"The reconstruction required an enormous number of experiments," says Markram, of the EPFL. "It paves the way for predicting the location, numbers, and even the amount of ion currents flowing through all 40 million synapses."
Once the reconstruction was complete, the investigators used powerful supercomputers to simulate the behavior of neurons under different conditions. Remarkably, the researchers found that, by slightly adjusting just one parameter, the level of calcium ions, they could produce broader patterns of circuit-level activity that could not be predicted based on features of the individual neurons. For instance, slow synchronous waves of neuronal activity, which have been observed in the brain during sleep, were triggered in their simulations, suggesting that neural circuits may be able to switch into different "states" that could underlie important behaviors.

This research is not aimed at creating SkyNet or creating some other new AI overlord. Rather the focus is on using the digital reconstructions to analyze and understand the workings of brains. The release exposits:

If you want to learn how something works, one strategy is to take it apart and put it back together again. For 10 years, a global initiative called the Blue Brain Project--hosted at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)--has been attempting to do this digitally with a section of juvenile rat brain. The project presents a first draft of this reconstruction, which contains over 31,000 neurons, 55 layers of cells, and 207 different neuron subtypes.

The complexity of life and especially neurological processes and functions are fascinating. Given the enormous resources required to simulate just this small slice of a juvenile rat brain, it's unlikely that we'll see full mammal brain simulations anytime soon. Even so, this is pretty darn cool!

Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Researchers Say They've Recreated Part of a Rat Brain Digitally | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 16 comments | Search Discussion

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

SoylentNews

SoylentNews is people

Navigation

Sections

SoylentNews

Log In