Researchers develop Virtual Rat Brain!
A global initiative called the Blue Brain Project-hosted at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)-has been attempting to create a section of juvenile rat brain digitally.
Scientists have created a virtual rat brain which is made up of 30,000 neurons, 55 layers of cells and 207 different neuron subtypes.
The project presents a first draft of this reconstruction, which contains over 31,000 neurons, 55 layers of cells, and 207 different neuron subtypes. What poses to be a major challenge is 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 neurons.
Henry Markram of the EPFL and colleagues have taken an engineering approach to this question by digitally reconstructing a slice of the neocortex. Neocortex is an area of the brain that has benefited from extensive characterization. A virtual brain slice representing the different neuron types present in this region was built.
"The reconstruction required an enormous number of experiments. It paves the way for predicting the location, numbers, and even the amount of ion currents flowing through all 40 million synapses," said Markram.
The investigators used powerful supercomputers to simulate the behavior of neurons under different conditions once the reconstruction was done. 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.
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