Researchers Model 10,000 Neurons

 Neuroscience  

Researchers have created models of neurons in the visual cortex of a mouse in order to better understand—and make predictions about—how neurons relay and code visual information.

Scientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have created models of neurons in the visual cortex of a mouse in order to better understand—and make predictions about—how neurons relay and code visual information.

This movie shows preliminary data of 10,000 neurons: 8,000 replicated pyramidal cells (an excitatory neuron, shown first) and 2,000 replicated interneurons (an inhibitory neuron, shown second).

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Copies of these two cells are displayed one after another in the movie until approximately 10% of the whole model is shown in the video.(More than that would be too cluttered to see what is happening.)

Toward the middle of the movie, the cells are colored according to their properties: excitatory in red and inhibitory in blue. The second half of the movie illustrates activity of the cells in a two second-long simulation. The cells that fire action potentials are intermittently highlighted, giving the viewer an impression of the simulated neuronal activity.

The results in themselves are amazing, but the scale compared with the 80 billion plus neurons in the human brain demonstrate the monumental task computational neuroscience projects like Europe's Human Brain Project and the US BRAIN Initiative have ahead of them.  Completing a connectome of a human brain in silico, will be some years away.



SOURCE  Allen Institute for Brain Science

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