Article,
Towards a virtual fly brain
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 367 (1896): 2387 --2397 (June 2009)
DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2008.0308
Abstract
Models of the brain that simulate sensory input, behavioural
output and information processing in a biologically plausible
manner pose significant challenges to both computer science
and biology. Here we investigated strategies that could be
used to create a model of the insect brain, specifically that
of Drosophila melanogaster that is very widely used in
laboratory research. The scale of the problem is an order of
magnitude above the most complex of the current simulation
projects, and it is further constrained by the relative
sparsity of available electrophysiological recordings from the
fly nervous system. However, fly brain research at the
anatomical and behavioural levels offers some interesting
opportunities that could be exploited to create a functional
simulation. We propose to exploit these strengths of
Drosophila central nervous system research to focus on a
functional model that maps biologically plausible network
architecture onto phenotypic data from neuronal inhibition and
stimulation studies, leaving aside biophysical modelling of
individual neuronal activity for future models until more data
are available.
