While neuroscience groups have been tackling new dimensions to crunch data for solving neurological conditions, an effort that seems promising for neurological disorders is computational neuroscience. In an effort to understand the brain’s disease conditions from a functional role,the computational neuroscience and neurophysiology lab at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s School of Biotechnology has been developing computer models based on experimental data of neurons and neural circuits. As neurological diseases have a basis with neural and circuit behavior, these models help understand how certain disabling molecular mechanisms explain clinical conditions and how applying certain drug molecules change functioning conditions. Due to complexity, the group uses stochastic differential equations and supercomputing techniques including CPU and GPGPU programming methods to solve large-scale simulations. The activity of this research group has been covered by various media in the news.
Dr. Shyam Diwakar, PI added “While it is relevant to experimentally validate every step, complexity in neuroscience limits researchers to specific studies. Bridging molecular neurobiology to physiology and clinical studies is now easier thanks to computational neuroscience. We do hope Amrita’s work will help understand and predict ataxias, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy in the long run”.
