You can download a worm to your computer. No not a virus, but a virtual recreation of the scientific community’s most beloved model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent, 1 mm nematode worm.
You can get your worm at the OpenWorm project’s official webpage.
While it’s currently in the crowd-funded, science-for-science’s sake stage, the OpenWorm project’s ultimate aim — a perfect virtual simulation of a well-known organism — would be a major boon. The Economist writes:
[…] C. elegans is already used to probe everything from basic biochemistry to the actions of drugs in laboratories. The ability to run those tests electronically, with no need for actual worms, and to be reasonably sure that the results will nonetheless be the same as in the real world, would be a boon to biological and medical research.
But key to the OpenWorm project’s potential is its atypical approach:
There are two ways to build a model: from the top down or from the bottom up. The top-down method is easier. Instead of worrying about how the thing being modelled works, you need only find some equations that reproduce its behaviour; economic models often work this way.
The other way, OpenWorm’s way, is to try to model the fundamental pieces of the thing you’re studying and, when you get it right, watch the larger properties like locomotion emerge naturally. “The idea, says Stephen Larson, a neuro- and computer scientist, who is the project’s co-ordinator, is to model the biochemical behaviour of every one of the worm’s cells, and how they interact with each other.”
Unfortunately, even in our modern age computers are not remotely powerful enough to accurately model every process happening in the messy world of a nematode’s cells. Thus the project becomes an exercise in figuring out what the most vital components are. The team is starting with its musculature:
For the moment, the team is planning systems that will simulate how the worm’s muscle cells work, how its neurons behave and how electrical impulses move from one to the other. There will be physics algorithms that give the worm a realistic simulation of a Petri dish to move through. They will also make sure its virtual muscles can deform its virtual body by the correct amount when they receive a virtual jolt from a virtual neuron.
Perhaps the most scintillating aspect of the quest to create a virtual nematode is what it would mean for crowd-sourcing biological research. Already OpenWorm is a Kickstarter success, and freely available for anyone to download and play with. The Economist gets at the potential in its final line: If [the OpenWorm team] succeeds in their ambitions, then doing biological research may one day become a simple matter of downloading some animals onto your computer, and getting started.
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Read the original article at The Economist: “Computer worms: A crowd-funded project aims to build the world’s first simulated organism“
Kenrick Vezina is Gene-ius Editor for the Genetic Literacy Project and a freelance science writer, educator, and naturalist based in the Greater Boston area.
Additional Resources:
“Can Virtual Worms Cure Alzheimer’s?” Catie Wayne | Boston.com
“OpenWorm project wants you to help create the world’s first digital organism,” Dean Takahashi | VentureBeat
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