The study of human brain function involves various challenges to the researchers, who must face reverse engineering efforts to understand their functions and, thus, develop more effective actions for the treatment of diseases such as depression and Alzheimer’s disease.
Due to the complexity of this type of study, a group of researchers began a project that seeks to mimic the brain of the fruit fly, known as Neurokernel. “It’s a model that is within the reach of current technology tools, and a neural activity that can be analyzed experimentally”, say the members of the initiative.
The fruit fly has 100,000 neurons (10^5), and those responsible for the Neurokernel project indicate that the insect has a number of genes and proteins common to the brains of mammals. Therefore, the study of this species will allow better understanding of more complex structures.
Neurokernel is an open platform to create models of the fruit fly brain at the computational level in a collaborative way, implemented in the Python programming language and based on multiple graphics processing units…