The Potjans-Diesmann cortical microcircuit model is a widely used model originally implemented in NEST. It is a full-scale spiking network model of 1 mm² of cortex, comprising four cortical layers, each containing an excitatory and an inhibitory population, with close to 80,000 point neurons. We reimplemented the model using NetPyNE and reproduced the findings of the original publication. We also implemented a method for scaling the network size that preserves firing rates and other statistics. Our new implementation enabled the use of more detailed neuron models with multicompartmental morphologies and multiple biophysically realistic ion channels. This opens the model to new research, including the study of dendritic processing, the influence of individual channel parameters, the relation to local field potentials (LFPs), and other multiscale interactions. See publication [11].
