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3-D Model of Rat Brain Circuit Created

After six years and several million dollars, scientists have created a 3-D model of a rat brain circuit.

The accomplishment is a first step toward creating a complete computermodel of the brain that will allow a deeper understanding of how our noggins work — and what causes them to malfunction, according to the scientists behind the feat.

For a starting point, researchers at the Max Planck Florida Institute are focused on how the rat brain processes information gathered by a single whisker.

They did so because studies in their lab and elsewhere have shown that a single whisker is able to detect, in complete darkness, whether a gap is safe to jump over and, if so, trigger the order to jump.

What's more, there's a specific region of the brain "that is dedicated to processing information from a dedicated whisker," Marcel Oberlaender, a researcher at the institute and the first author of a paper explaining the research in the journal Cerebral Cortex, told me today.

That region is called the cortical column, a vertically-organized series ofconnected neurons that form a brain circuit and an elementary building block of the cortex.
The cortex is the part of the brain responsible for many of the higher functions, such as memory and consciousness.

To build the model, the researchers studied the cortical column in awake and anesthetized rats as well as brain slices and then used computersoftware and other tools to reconstruct it.

"The model we built is really based on a complete reconstruction of these nerve cells," Oberlaender said. "So how the model looks in the end resembles how it would look in the real animal."'

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