Simulating Alzheimer's amyloid-like pathology on a fly central nervous system connectome

In Alzheimer's disease, the amount of pathology in the brain is an imperfect predictor of how much function is lost. Pathology leads to that loss through neural circuits, but these cannot be observed neuron by neuron in patients. This study therefore simulated the central nervous system of the adult male Drosophila melanogaster: 166,700 integrate-and-fire neurons wired by the MaleCNS connectome. The simulator reproduced a published fly brain model (rate correlation 0.9997). Three kinds of damage reported in amyloid- β flies, a lowered spike threshold, synapse loss and neuron loss, were imposed with assumed magnitudes, and circuit responses were measured in 1,424 simulated flies. The number of neurons lost was a poor guide to the deficit, which depended partly on how many synaptic contacts went with them and whether they included input neurons or one command neuron. With the same 12% of neurons removed, odour-evoked whole-brain activity was 93%, 47% or 31% of the healthy value when damage fell on poorly connected, random or highly connected neurons; these flies lost 20%, 35% and 48% of contacts. When the contacts lost were equalised, the three groups differed less; whether the remaining difference reflects where the damage fell could not be established. In 48 flies, restoring only the contacts that surviving neurons had lost recovered 62% of the whole-brain deficit, and restoring the removed neurons 39%. In flies that had lost neurons delivering the odour, these accounted for about half the deficit due to neuron loss. One neuron could decide an outcome: all 66 flies that lost the giant fibre on the stimulated side, which commands escape, had a giant fibre rate below 100 Hz, against 1 of 254 that kept it. Whole-brain activity revealed damage at milder severity than the learning index, because it changed much relative to its variation between trials.