2 — Inferring cortical function in the mouse visual system through large-scale systems neuroscience.

This paper explains the multi-scale neural simulation approach taken by the MindScope team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Like Xie et al, 2016, it focuses on tiling cortical motifs: When trying to simulate brain tissue, the authors suggest using fine-grained biophysical simulation where computationally feasible, whereas nearby tissue is modeled with “point neurons,” or cells that loosely simulate the action-potential trains of biological neurons, and the rest of the brain is modeled using population statistics using known information about different brain regions. The paper’s scope is intentionally limited to mouse V1, where cortical columns are known to exist.

The team has released an open-source simulation framework which complements the Allen Institute’s extensive public databases of neural morphology and and neurophysiology.

I’m curious what further studies into the roles of inhibitory interneurons will yield: It sounds like the mentioned VIP, SST, and PV interneuron classes differ so dramatically in their effects on simulation outcome that it will be impossible to even begin to understand cortical circuitry without first closely modeling the local inhibitory components in both temporal and spatial domains.