Researchers Create A Simulated Mouse Brain in a Virtual Mouse Body

 Neuroscience  

Neurorobotics engineers from the Human Brain Project have recently taken the first steps towards building a "virtual mouse" by placing a simplified computer model of the mouse brain into a virtual mouse body. This new kind of tool will be made available to scientists worldwide.

Neurorobotics scientist Marc-Oliver Gewaltig and his team at the Human Brain Project (HBP) built a model mouse brain and a model mouse body, integrating them both into a single simulation and providing a simplified but comprehensive model of how the body and the brain interact with each other. "Replicating sensory input and motor output is one of the best ways to go towards a detailed brain model analogous to the real thing," explains Gewaltig.

"The tools that we are developing are so general that we could in principle model any organism with varying levels of detail. With every future iteration, they will become more realistic and useful."

As computing technology improves, their goal is to build the tools and the infrastructure that will allow researchers to perform virtual experiments on mice and other virtual organisms. This virtual neurorobotics platform is just one of the collaborative interfaces being developed by the HBP. A first version of the software will be released to collaborators in April.

The HBP scientists used biological data about the mouse brain collected by the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network in San Diego. These data contain detailed information about the positions of the mouse brain's 75 million neurons and the connections between different regions of the brain. They integrated this information with complementary data on the shapes, sizes and connectivity of specific types of neurons collected by the Blue Brain Project in Geneva.


A simplified version of the virtual mouse brain (just 200,000 neurons) was then mapped to different parts of the mouse body, including the mouse's spinal cord, whiskers, eyes and skin. For instance, touching the mouse's whiskers activated the corresponding parts of the mouse sensory cortex. And they expect the models to improve as more data comes in and gets incorporated.

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For Gewaltig, building a virtual organism is an exercise in data integration. By bringing together multiple sources of data of varying detail into a single virtual model and testing this against reality, data integration provides a way of evaluating – and fostering – our own understanding of the brain. In this way, he hopes to provide a big picture of the brain by bringing together separated data sets from around the world.

Gewaltig compares the exercise to the 15th century European data integration projects in geography, when scientists had to patch together known smaller scale maps. These first attempts were not to scale and were incomplete, but the resulting globes helped guide further explorations and the development of better tools for mapping the Earth, until reaching today's precision.

In the same way, Gewaltig and his colleagues in the Human Brain Project are working towards mapping and modeling the brain. Expected improvements in computing power will make it possible to incorporate greater levels of detail. "The tools that we are developing are so general that we could in principle model any organism with varying levels of detail. With every future iteration, they will become more realistic and useful."



SOURCE  Human Brain Project

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