SIM-CE: An Advanced Simulink Platform for Studying the Brain of Caenorhabditis elegans
This provides a user-friendly tool for neuroscientists studying C. elegans to test hypotheses and analyze behavioral plasticity, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Simulink and modeling frameworks.
The researchers tackled the problem of modeling the nervous system of C. elegans by introducing SIM-CE, a Simulink-based platform that enables multi-scale behavioral analysis, allowing users to simulate neuronal, synaptic, and neural-circuit-level dynamics to uncover unknown neural properties.
We introduce SIM-CE, an advanced, user-friendly modeling and simulation environment in Simulink for performing multi-scale behavioral analysis of the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). SIM-CE contains an implementation of the mathematical models of C. elegans's neurons and synapses, in Simulink, which can be easily extended and particularized by the user. The Simulink model is able to capture both complex dynamics of ion channels and additional biophysical detail such as intracellular calcium concentration. We demonstrate the performance of SIM-CE by carrying out neuronal, synaptic and neural-circuit-level behavioral simulations. Such environment enables the user to capture unknown properties of the neural circuits, test hypotheses and determine the origin of many behavioral plasticities exhibited by the worm.