We are very happy to announce a new release of brian2tools, a selection of useful tools around the Brian simulator. This is a “big release” 
that has several new features that have been developed over the last years but never officially released until now. In particular:
- the ability to import neuronal morphologies from NeuroML descriptions, including information about channel types, channel densities, and general biophysical properties. This feature has been developed by Kapil Kumar (@kapilkd13) as part of the Google Summer of Code 2018.
- a new general framework for exporting neuronal models (including to NeuroML). As a demonstration of this framework, it is now possible to export a Brian model description as human-readable markdown. This feature has been developed by @Vigneswaran as part of 2020’s Google Summer of Code.
- improved support for plotting morphologies. It is now possible to plot a morphology and color code a value that varies across the neuron (e.g. the membrane potential) on top of it. Thanks to @mqcapelle for contributing this feature.
For more information, have a look at the documentation. The brian2tools package can be installed via pip or conda, i.e. use either of the two following commands:
$ pip install brian2tools # installation with pip
$ conda install -c brian-team brian2tools # installation with conda
To get an idea of what markdown export of model descriptions look like, see the reposity showcasing the Brian examples: Brian2-examples-markdown-descriptions/brian_examples at master · Vigneswaran-Chandrasekaran/Brian2-examples-markdown-descriptions · GitHub I’m also sure @Vigneswaran will be happy to answer questions about this feature 