JuRSE Code of the Month - November 2025

Each month we highlight a code from Forschungszentrum Jülich and this month's code is Elephant, co-developed at the Institute for Advanced Simulation, Computational and Systems Neuroscience (IAS-6).

Elephant
Elephant (Electrophysiology Analysis Toolkit) is an open-source, community centered library for the analysis of electrophysiological brain activity data in the Python programming language. The focus of Elephant is on generic analysis functions for spike train data and time series recordings from electrodes, such as the local field potentials or intracellular voltages.

JuRSE selected highlights
The "I" in FAIR is a big one for this code. The focus is on providing a common, consistent, and homogeneous platform for analysis of experimental and simulated neuronal activity data, supporting dozens of file formats and network simulation tools. This is achieved by building on the emerging interoperability layer Neo to standardize electrophysiology data inputs and outputs. Developed within the huge Human Brain Project and the EBRAINS research infrastructure, the authors had to deal with lots of potential customers and funders' requirements right from the start. This is where the FAIR4RS idea can be a great guiding principle: developing code already with findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability in mind is easier than imposing these afterwards.

More information
Website: https://www.python-elephant.org
RSD: https://helmholtz.software/software/elephant
GitHub: https://github.com/NeuralEnsemble/elephant