Functioning map of 30,000 neurons.
By Raif Karerat
Eighty-two researchers from institutions around the world reported they had built a reconstruction of a section of a rat brain in a computer.
The research was partly supported by the Human Brain Project, a more than $1 billion, 10-year European research program, according to the New York Times. The report originated from the Blue Brain Project, which aims to reconstruct the rat brain and eventually the human brain in a computer.
Hosted at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) institute in Switzerland, the Blue Brain Project is taking a direct engineering approach to the challenge of creating a digital brain, reported Discovery News. “The research team essentially took apart a slice of rat brain, then put it back together again using powerful supercomputers that can simulate the behavior of individual neurons,” revealed the news arm of the popular Discovery Channel.
Henry Markram, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, who leads both projects, said that what he and his many colleagues had achieved was the first draft of a functioning map of 30,000 neurons.
He said this was not yet a proof of principle that scientists could indeed reconstruct the human brain, which contains 85 billion or more neurons, but that it was a first step.
Cori Bargmann, co-director of the new Kavli Neural Systems Institute at Rockefeller University, who has been “intimately involved with the Brain Initiative,” told The Times “simulations are in their infancy.”
“They built a 747, and it’s taxiing around the runway,” she mused. “I haven’t seen it fly yet, but it’s promising.”
In order to reconstruct the rat brain, researchers did not record the details of every single cell.
“They used the data from some cells to inform what the whole would look like. Then they simulated certain kinds of brain activity and found that the reconstruction acted like the living tissue,” reported the New York Times. All the data for the reconstruction will be available for other scientists.
The report, published in Cell, a scientific journal, is one of the longest neuroscience reports ever released.