OpenWorm

OpenWorm is an international open science project for the purpose of simulating the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans at the cellular level.

As of 2014, a physics engine called Sibernetic has been built for the project and models of the neural connectome and a muscle cell have been created in NeuroML format.

[5] The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is a free-living, transparent nematode, about 1 mm in length,[6] that lives in temperate soil environments.

Being a model organism, the genome is fully known, along with many well characterized mutants readily available, and a comprehensive literature of behavioural studies.

The manipulation of neurons via optogenetic methods, in tandem with the foregoing technical capacities, has provided the project an unprecedented position - now able to fully characterize the neural dynamics of an entire organism.

[12][13] In 2005 a Texas researcher described a simplified C. elegans simulator based on a 1-wire network incorporating a digital Parallax Basic Stamp processor, sensory inputs and motor outputs.

To compensate for this the Hiroshima group used machine learning to find some weights of the synapses which would generate the desired behaviour.

[15] Generally this means that the team will try to publish in open access journals and include all data gathered (to avoid the file drawer problem).

Of the most active members who are named on a publication there are collaborators from Russia, Brazil, England, Scotland, Ireland and the United States.

To coordinate this international effort, the team uses "virtual lab meetings" and other online tools that are detailed in the resources section.