Markram, H. et al. Cell 163, 456–492 (2015).

Attempts to understand brain function benefit from both experimental and computational approaches. Markram et al. report on the progress of the Blue Brain Project, a European initiative that has resulted in reconstruction of a piece of rat neocortex based on morphological characterization of about a thousand neurons distributed among different layers as well as more than 14,000 electrical recordings and other information such as synaptic composition. Although it is considered a draft reconstruction, the in silico neocortex can exhibit spontaneous activity and reproduce activity evoked by whisker stimulations. Future drafts of the neocortex simulation will require further refinement based on additional data, but the current implementation of the simulation may nevertheless be useful for testing hypotheses or for analytical purposes.