21 December 2007
Rat brain simulation could replace animal tests
Researchers in Switzerland have built a computer model of a neocortical column of a rat’s brain, paving the way for a whole-brain simulation to be constructed.
The project, led by Henry Markram at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), was thought to be hugely over-ambitious by other researchers, but completion of this first phase should quieten the critics.
The ‘silicon model’ is based on the rat rather than the human brain, but nonetheless is an exciting example of computer modelling in neuroscience, an area largely dominated by animal research at present.
It has taken two years to build the rat neocortical column, just two millimetres long and half a millimetre in diameter, but Markram already has big ideas. He hopes to go on eventually to build a human brain simulation. This would require enormous computing power to run. The rat brain section requires a supercomputer capable of 18.7 trillion calculations per second, but one based on an entire human brain would need a computer the size of several football pitches. Markram hopes that computer technology will have moved on sufficiently to enable use of a more realistic computer by the time his research is at this stage of development.
Markram says “We don’t use simulation in life sciences because biology requires the most powerful computers, we do experiments on animals, but that is going to change in the near future and this project will drive that change.”
The developers hope that one day the simulation will be used to study neurological disorders such as depression, schizophrenia and dementia.
Source: The Guardian 20 December 2007
Reference: Migliore M et al (2006). Parallel network simulations with NEURON. J Comput Neurosci 21:119-129.