The most exciting thing happening today in digital biology has got to be the OpenWorm project. Its stated goal is nothing less than to simulate the entire c. elegans organism down to level of each individual cell. Like other crowdsourced initiatives such as the EyeWire brain mapping project, anyone can get involved, and looking at what they have accomplished so far, perhaps everyone should.

The OpenWorm Kickstarter has already raised over $30,000 of its $120,000 goal. What they aim to do is bring their incredibly detailed simulations of the worm to your web browser. As we have detailed before, reducing a kilo-cell dynamic organism interacting with its environment to a stream of 1s and 0s that can be refleshed on the screen in front of you is no easy task. A full third of the cells of this creature are neurons, or neuron-like multitaskers, which must accomplish the full life-suite of functions of the worm using the remaining 600 cells. In CAD terms, you might call these simulations multiphysics or multibio, as they model not only the mechanical form, but also the electrical, fluid mechanics, and other systems that are at play in a complex organism.

A major milestone of the project was bringing each muscle cell under code to be able to simulate contraction and locomotion in the worm. Eventually the team hopes to be able to model some more complex behaviors such as the well known “escape the lariat trick.” This maneuver, in which the worm wiggles out of the confines of a small wire loop, is used by researchers to study things like learning and memory. Using a precisely-controlled femtosecond laser scalpel, researchers can deactivate isolated patches of worm control circuitry and see the effects.

But with the whole works monitored in OpenWorm, like the NSA on Facebook, not only will various prods and probes like this be reversible, but omniscient. The web browser interface will take you inside the worm in a guided walkthrough where the various homeostatic systems can be highlighted. The level of detail is such that idiosyncratic features of the real worm — like asymmetries in the control neurons between the two sides of the worm — can be studied directly. Eventually perhaps the simulations can even include subcellular processes like the dynamic behavior of mitochondria coursing through neurite channels as the worm senses and moves. While developmental or regenerative events are often studied in the larger planarian flatworm, things like axonal regrowth could potentially be investigated with some refinements to the model.

In the study of larger multicellular creatures, like you and me, it has become popular to discuss the full “microbiome” of the organism. This would include, in addition to our eukaryotic cells, all the endosymbiotic bacteria that inhabit our bodies. Some people even classify our mitochondria themselves as such bacteria. It is interesting to observe that for millimeter-scale creatures like c. elegans, where the primary source of food is bacteria, digestion and innate immunity can be viewed, in a sense, as the Janus faces of menu and microbiome.

In other words, the question of what to do with something you just ate is intimately tied to the biological question of what it is exactly that you just ate. While worms have a digestive system analogous in function to ours, the worm’s cells can not afford to specialize to the degree they do in higher organisms. Luxuries like immune systems and circulatory systems are not the province of multi-cell fleets in the worm, but rather become the responsibility of individual cells. In this view, a bacterial sustenance, virtually DNA itself, is not just consumption for building blocks and energy, but for information itself.

The rewards to the future ability to zoom into things at this level of detail and test hypotheses are inestimable. Getting in on the ground floor of the new science of technologizing life into code is a chance that no one interested in biology should pass up.