I've done a number of posts on the C. Elegans worm that has 302 neurons, apparently the simplest 'brain' of any creature (it's less than a hair width's long). So I was interested in Wired's article "The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack" by Claire L. Evans, posted March 26, 2025, where she investigates the efforts to create a software simulation of the worm, to model its movements, etc. Unsurprisingly, the latest approach is all about data:
Use genetic imaging technology to activate each neuron in the worm’s nervous system one by one, measuring its effect on the other 301. Repeated hundreds of thousands of times in parallel experiments, this methodical process should hoover up enough data to give the computational folks, finally, something to work with—enough, even, to “reverse engineer” the worm completely.
It’s an ambitious proposal, one that will require an unprecedented level of collaboration between some 20 different worm labs. Gal Haspel, a computational neuroscientist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the lead author on the reverse engineering paper, estimates that pulling it off may take up to 10 years, cost tens of millions of dollars, and require something in the neighborhood of 100,000 to 200,000 real-life worms. In the process, it will generate more data about C. elegans than has been collected in all of science to date.
Looks like there's still a lot of work to do!
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