OpenWorm looks to simulate life, with your help

C. elegans is more important than you. To be fair, the little worm is more important than just about everybody, more important than fruit flies and mice and chimpanzees. The most important model organism is e. coli, the next is yeast, and the next is c. elegans. The world’s most famous nematode came to prominence when researchers noticed that it contains just 302 neurons, making it one of the simplest nervous systems ever observed. From this point on, c. elegans was the model of virtually every basic study into neuron function. If you’re looking to fiddle with an axonal growth gene, you do it in c. elegans first since the simple little thing is so well understood, as are the many ways in which it can die. As such, the worm has been one of the main sources of research for more than forty years.

That kind of knowledge can’t be allowed to go to waste as just a big reference database; the best science is always creative, not descriptive! Recently announced, the OpenWorm project looks to kickstart that creative side by exploiting our comprehensive understanding of the species to let us make a nematode from scratch. It would exist solely in the RAM of the beholders, of course — a purely computational modelling of this exceedingly simple life-form — but a working (or even partially failing) model would be a truly revolutionary step forward for our understanding of life.

A “win” in this case would mean generating nematode behavior simply by inputting detailed and accurate-enough information into detailed and accurate-enough models. A model called the NeuroML Connectome is being used to model every one of the 302 neurons and all of their interconnections, for instance, and a fluid modeler simulates the environment to surveys whole body movement. Many such systems are to be united under OpenWorm’s own system, the Geppetto life simulation engine.

This all takes a bottom-up approach, much like our attempts to understand protein folding, starting from the lowest level of organization and testing our understanding of that level by using it to predict or induce higher-level structures. Also like protein folding, this worm creation process will likely prove extremely difficult and time consuming, but the process of trying to is educational enough to justify the work.

That this work is open-source speaks to a growing awareness within science that crowdsourcing is both a powerful and entitled force. As with protein folding, the hope seems to be to give seemingly insurmountable problems to the world’s server farm, only this time they are looking to rent use of your mind, as well as your processor.