An evolutionary developmental approach for generation of 3D neuronal morphologies using gene regulatory networks

Computational modeling of neuronal morphologies is significant for understanding structure-function relationships and brain information processing in computational neuroscience. Using a gene regulatory network model, an evolutionary developmental approach is presented for efficient generation of 3D virtual neurons. This approach describes the developmental process of dendritic morphologies by locally inter-correlating morphological variables which can be represented by the dynamics of gene expression. Then, the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm with gene segmental duplication and divergence operators is applied to evolve the virtual neurons, which aims at generating virtual neurons that are as good as the experimentally traced real neurons in terms of statistical morphological measurements. We experimentally generated motoneurons and statistically compared between the real neurons and the generated virtual neurons by measuring a series of emergent morphological features. The results show that the generated virtual neurons are seemingly realistic, accurate, and further suggest that this approach is an efficient tool for understanding neural development and investigating the relation of neuronal structure to function in particular.