Insights from modeling growth of a Drosophila neural network
June 2025
Together with the electrical engineer Dr. Karlheinz Ochs we received funding for an additional postdoc to study genome-driven circuit development as a bio-inspiration for electrical circuitry.
How can developmental growth of biological neural circuits benefit electrical engineering approaches to circuit design? Biological neural circuitry develops based on genomes that contain information how to grow circuits, not a blueprint that would describe circuitry. From an engineering perspective, some of the desirable features of such a growth process are (1) energy efficiency, (2) substantially less information required for an outcome encoding, and (3) robustness to perturbation. For this proposal, we developed a novel electrical engineering approach to implement circuit growth to scout out the feasibility for electrical engineering as well as learn general principles underlying circuit growth.
