Digital Brain Chunk Developed Over 10-Years Of Research
Researchers have built a piece of a rat brain over the past 10 years and this week they're ready to show it off. Partially. What you're seeing here is a photo of a virtual brain slice, part of the Blue Brain Project as hosted at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). This chunk has been created digitally, mapping a section of juvenile rat brain for starters. Eventually the group hopes to show the whole brain – then move on to other animals.
Researchers led by the EPFL's Henry Markram have been digitally reconstructing a big slice of a tiny brain, focusing on the neocortex. They focus on this area due to its already-extensive characterization in the scientific community in the past.
ABOVE: Virtual Slices of Brain via Makram et al./Cell 2015
As Markram suggests, "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."
This is a state-run and open bit of research. As such, you the average reader are able to have a peek at what researchers have constructed so far at theBlue Brain Project homepage.
Once this first reconstruction was first completed, researchers began simulating behaviors of the brain by firing digital neurons. By adjusting digital representations of calcium ions, these researchers discovered that they were able to product broad patterns of circuit-level activity that had not been previously predicted.
These bits of activity have big potential for brain research in the near future – or 10 more years into the future when they've produced another big bit of the rat brain. We'll see!
You can learn more at the link posted above or through the paper "Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry" as authored by Henry Markram, Elif Muller, Srikanth Ramaswamy, Michael W. Reimann, Javier DeFelipe, Sean L. Hill, Idan Segev, Felix Schürmann, et. all. This paper was published by Cell under code DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.09.029.