Scientists Fragment Rat’s Brain to Reconstruct It Using a Supercomputer

A large team of worldwide neuroscientists from the Blue Brain Project have been successful in recreating a digital version of a slice of a rat’s brain using supercomputers. This handsome reconstruction is like a fundamental building block of the brain, he said. This particular neocortex can be found in the rat’s primary somatosensory cortex, which is primarily responsible for accepting and disseminating sensory information. A few have argued that the study will reveal no more about the gray matter’s workings than do more abstract and simpler simulations of neural circuitry, while sucking up a great deal of resources and computing power. They further tested whether the digital reconstruction could reproduce the recent discovery that a few neurons in the brain are closely synchronized with neighboring neurons (dubbed, “chorists”), while others operate independently from the group (“soloists”).

Through this program, scientists have uncovered over 40 million synapses and more than 2,000 connections between individual brain cells.

Main aim of the Blue Brain project is to digitally reconstruct the brain in a computer by performing experiments of animals.

Whilst this is a mammoth achievement, the team would need to create a whopping 86 billion cells to mimic humans’ super clever brains. The demonstration also allowed them to see the behavior of neurons under different conditions and it further raises many new types of questions to explore.

Once they created the model, scientists moved on to simulating it. The results were exciting: they seemed to correlate with rat brain experiments in the real world, suggesting that the researchers were on the right track. Getting a full, high-resolution picture of all the features and activity of the neurons within a brain region and the circuit-level behaviours of neurons is a major challenge. “But what we also realized is you don’t have to”, because the vast amount of data collected through the project has offered science’s first approximation of the microcircuitry of the brain, he said.

No matter how similar rat brains may be to human brains, the differences can not be ignored. “It paves the best way for predicting the situation, numbers, and even the quantity of ion currents flowing by way of all forty million synapses”, stated Markram.

While the study mapped 30,000 cells, it would take 85 billion to reconstruct a human brain.

Representative rat brain showing a focal ischemic lesion within the right middle cerebral artery territory.

But according to the leader of both programs, Henry Markram of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, this is only the “first draft of a functioning map of 30,000 brain cells”.