The Blue Brain Project is a Swiss brain research initiative that aims to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of ''

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine The Seine ( , ) is a river in northern Franc ...

'' (EPFL) in Switzerland. Its mission is to use biologically-detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function. The project is headed by the founding director

Henry Markram Henry John Markram (born 28 March 1962) is a South African-born Israeli neuroscientist, professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and director of the Blue Brain Project and founder of the Human Brain Proj ...

—who also launched the European Human Brain Project—and is co-directed by Felix Schürmann, Adriana Salvatore and Sean Hill. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's

NEURON A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an membrane potential#Cell excitability, electrically excitable cell (biology), cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous ...

, the simulation involves a biologically realistic model of

neuron A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an membrane potential#Cell excitability, electrically excitable cell (biology), cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous ...

s and an empirically reconstructed model connectome. There are a number of collaborations, including the

Cajal Blue Brain The Blue Brain Project is a Swiss brain research initiative that aims to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of ''École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne'' (EP ...

, which is coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories.

Goal

The initial goal of the project, which was completed in December 2006, was the creation of a simulated rat neocortical column, which is considered by some researchers to be the smallest functional unit of the neocortex, which is thought to be responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought. In humans, each column is about in length, has a diameter of and contains about 60,000 neurons.

Rat Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents. Species of rats are found throughout the order Rodentia, but stereotypical rats are found in the genus ''Rattus''. Other rat genera include ''Neotoma'' ( pack rats), ''Bandicota'' (bandicoot ...

neocortical columns are very similar in structure but contain only 10,000 neurons and 10⁸

synapse In the nervous system, a synapse is a structure that permits a neuron (or nerve cell) to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron or to the target effector cell. Synapses are essential to the transmission of nervous impulses fr ...

s. Between 1995 and 2005, Markram mapped the types of neurons and their connections in such a column.

Progress

By 2005, the first cellular model was completed. The first artificial cellular neocortical column of 10,000 cells was built by 2008. By July 2011, a cellular mesocircuit of 100 neocortical columns with a million cells in total was built. A cellular rat brain had been planned for 2014 with 100 mesocircuits totalling a hundred million cells. A cellular human brain equivalent to 1,000 rat brains with a total of a hundred billion cells has been predicted to be possible by 2023. In November 2007, the project reported the end of the first phase, delivering a data-driven process for creating, validating, and researching the neocortical column. In 2015, scientists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed a quantitative model of the previously unknown relationship between the

glial cell astrocyte Glia, also called glial cells (gliocytes) or neuroglia, are non- neuronal cells in the central nervous system ( brain and spinal cord) and the peripheral nervous system that do not produce electrical impulses. They maintain homeostasis, for ...

s and neurons. This model describes the energy management of the brain through the function of the neuro-glial vascular unit (NGV). The additional layer of neuron-glial cells is being added to Blue Brain Project models to improve functionality of the system. In 2017, Blue Brain Project discovered that neural cliques connected to one another in up to eleven dimensions. The project's director suggested that the difficulty of understanding the brain is partly because the mathematics usually applied for studying networks cannot detect that many dimensions. The Blue Brain Project was able to model these networks using

algebraic topology Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism, though usually most classif ...

. In 2018, Blue Brain Project released it
first digital 3D brain cell atlas
which, according to '' ScienceDaily'', is like "going from hand-drawn maps to Google Earth", providing information about major cell types, numbers, and positions in 737 regions of the brain. In 2019, Idan Segev, one of the computational neuroscientists working on the Blue Brain Project, gave a talk titled: "Brain in the computer: what did I learn from simulating the brain." In his talk, he mentioned that the whole cortex for the mouse brain was complete and virtual EEG experiments would begin soon. He also mentioned that the model had become too heavy on the supercomputers they were using at the time, and that they were consequently exploring methods in which every neuron could be represented as a neural network (see citation for details). In 2022, scientists at the Blue Brain Project used algebraic topology to create an algorithm, Topological Neuronal Synthesis, that generates a large number of unique cells using only a few examples, synthesizing millions of unique neuronal morphologies. This allows them to replicate both healthy and diseased states of the brain. In a paper Kenari et al. were able to digitally synthesize dendritic morphologies from the mouse brain using this algorithm. They mapped entire brain regions from just a few reference cells. Since it is open source, this will enable the modelling of brain diseases and eventually, the algorithm could lead to digital twins of brains.

Software

The Blue Brain Project has developed a number of software to reconstruct and to simulate the mouse brain.

Blue Brain Nexus

Blue Brain Nexus is a data integration platform which uses a knowledge graph to enable users to search, deposit, and organise data. It stands on the FAIR data principles to provide flexible data management solutions beyond neuroscience studies. It is an open source software and available for everyone on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

BluePyOpt

BluePyOpt is a tool that is used to build electrical models of single neurons. For this, it uses

evolutionary algorithm In computational intelligence (CI), an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a subset of evolutionary computation, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses mechanisms inspired by biological evolution, such as rep ...

s to constrain the parameters to experimental electrophysiological data. Attempts to reconstruct single neurons using BluePyOpt are reported by

Rosanna Migliore Rosanna may refer to: * Rosanna (given name) * "Rosanna" (song), a 1982 song by Toto * ''Rosanna'' (film), a 1953 Mexican film * Rosanna, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne ** Rosanna railway station * Rosanna, a community in the township of Norwi ...

, and Stefano Masori. It is an open source software and available for everyone on

CoreNEURON

CoreNEURON is a supplemental tool to

, which allows large scale simulation by boosting memory usage and computational speed. It is an open source software and available for everyone on

NeuroMorphoVis

NeuroMorphoVis is a visualisation tool for morphologies of neurons. It is an open source software and available for everyone on

SONATA

SONATA is a joint effort between Blue Brain Project and Allen Institute for Brain Science, to develop a standard for data format, which realises a multiple platform working environment with greater computational memory and efficiency. It is an open source software and available for everyone on

Funding

The project is funded primarily by the Swiss government and the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship grant from the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

, and secondarily by grants and donations from private individuals. The EPFL bought the Blue Gene computer at a reduced cost because it was still a prototype and IBM was interested in exploring how applications would perform on the machine. BBP was viewed as a validation of the Blue Gene supercomputer concept.

Related projects

Cajal Blue Brain

The

Cajal Blue Brain Project Cajal: * Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Spanish histologist, physician, pathologist * Fortún Garcés Cajal, medieval Spanish nobleman * Nicolae Cajal (1919–2004), Romanian Jewish physician, academic, politician, philanthropist * Cajal Institute, a ...

is coordinated by the Technical University of Madrid and uses the facilities of the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid and its supercomputer Magerit. The Cajal Institute also participates in this collaboration. The main lines of research currently being pursued at Cajal Blue Brain include neurological experimentation and computer simulations. Nanotechnology, in the form of a newly designed brain microscope, plays an important role in its research plans.

Documentary

Noah Hutton Noah ''Nukh''; am, ኖህ, ''Noḥ''; ar, نُوح '; grc, Νῶε ''Nôe'' () is the tenth and last of the pre-Flood patriarchs in the traditions of Abrahamic religions. His story appears in the Hebrew Bible ( Book of Genesis, chapters ...

created the documentary film ''In Silico'' over a 10-year period. The film was released in April 2021.The film covers the "shifting goals and landmarks" of the Blue Brain Project as well as the drama, "In the end, this isn’t about science. It’s about the universals of power, greed, ego, and fame."

References

External links

Blue Brain ProjectBlue Brain Portal
- Knowledge Space for Neuroscience
''Out of the Blue''
SEEDMAGAZINE.Com {{Portal bar, Switzerland Neuroinformatics IBM supercomputers Computational neuroscience Virtual reality organizations Cognitive modeling École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne