Resources
Authors & Affiliations
Dianela Andreina Osorio Becerra, Dimitri Rodarie, Alessio Marta, Claudia Casellato, Egidio D'Angelo
Abstract
The cerebellum, a long-studied brain structure, has recently experienced significant advances in our understanding of its functions in many processes. Although its influence on emotions is still being studied, the cerebellum has been found to influence emotional control. This has important implications for understanding emotional disorders and neuropsychiatric conditions, contributing to a broader understanding of brain function in emotions.Our project consists of developing a bottom-up model, addressing the microscale, mesoscale, and large scale. This approach seeks to capture the structure, function, and dynamics of the network. Adapting current data and theories on the specific regions of the cerebellum involved in emotional control, we recreate the microcircuit, validate its dynamics, embed and connect it to modules of the cerebellar cortex, brainstem, and brain regions to account for the complete centers involved in emotional behaviour.Due to current data limitations, we focus our model on rodents and fear conditioning. We present a pipeline to reconstruct the mouse Declive (a crucial lobule implicated in emotional processing), based on the Blue Brain Cell Atlas model and the Brain Scaffold Builder (BSB) tool. The outcome is a circuit subsequently simulated as a spiking neural network in NEST simulator to explore the dynamics of the Declive between other cerebellar structures in the resting state and under appropriate stimuli in fear conditioning. Employing TVMB simulator and the connectome derived from fMRI data in resting states and tasks (fear conditioning), we analyze the fear circuit, taking into consideration all the connections and implicated brain regions.