Sciences de la Vie

The Blue Brain Project

In 2005 the Blue Brain Project (http://bluebrain.epfl.ch), headed by Prof. Henry Markram, started out to introduce simulation-based research in neuroscience, the ability to research the fundamentals of neurobiology in silico. The Blue Brain Project provides a comprehensive facility to generate and validate biophysically accurate models of cortical brain tissue at the cellular level. The core of the facility is a tight iteration cycle between experiment, model building, in silico experimentation and automated validation that can be completed in a week's time on the CADMOS BlueGene/P (16k cores) supercomputer. The current iteration is based on more than 10 years of quantitative electrophysiological recording in the somatosensory neocortex of a young rat and presently consists of 10,000 morphologically detailed neurons with genetically constrained ion channel populations distributed across the 3D morphology. This facility now provides the first-of-a-kind opportunity to perform rapid experiments on this virtual tissue that would require complex technical apparatuses and years to carry out on biological tissue. Already many biological findings can be reproduced using virttual tissue and that even deeper insights can be obtained than possible on biological tissue. The facility can now also be used for hypothesis testing, where proposed alterations in disease can be integrated and the hypothesized disease state can be simulated.