Reconstructed rat brain portion marks simulation milestone

The Blue Brain Project, led by Henry Markram at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), has completed the first draft of a digital reconstruction of a small portion of the rat brain. The achievement demonstrates the feasibility of simulating brain structure and function on supercomputers. The Blue Brain Project is the Swiss arm of the international Human Brain Project – a decade-long research endeavour funded by the European Union. The results, which have been published in the journal Cell, represent collaboration between 82 scientists from institutions around the world over 20 years. The digital reconstruction represents about a quarter of a cubic millimetre of rat brain tissue: 30,000 neurons and 40 million synapses. In addition to matching modelled electrical activity patterns to biological observations, the simulation provided some new insights into brain function at the molecular level. “We can’t and don’t have to measure everything,” Markram ...