From owner-celegans@net.bio.net Fri Jan 30 22:00:00 1998 Path: biosci!biosci!not-for-mail From: Mitchell Porter Newsgroups: bionet.celegans Subject: Towards a fully virtual C. elegans Date: 31 Jan 1998 04:52:04 -0800 Organization: BIOSCI International Newsgroups for Molecular Biology Lines: 41 Sender: daemon@net.bio.net Approved: wmorgan@acs.wooster.edu Distribution: world Message-ID: <6av6pk$i6b@net.bio.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: net.bio.net Hello C. elegans researchers, I've just been having a browse around the web resources describing C. elegans, and was inspired by the Parts index (http://eatworms.swmed.edu/htbin/parts/) to conceive of a few further steps that could be taken towards a fully virtual C. elegans. i) Morphogenesis server. See each stage in C. elegans morphogenesis on a string of web pages, so that you can click your way from the zygote to the adult organism - and at each stage, each cell should also be clickable, leading to a page describing that cell type (histology, lineage, etc). ii) Morphogenesis simulator. A *program* that will reproduce the morphogenetic stages described, just given the appropriate initial conditions (i.e. a zygote). I'm not sure of the appropriate level of abstraction here, i.e. how cellular states should be described. Presumably this simulation would have some stochastic aspect to it. iii) Simulated adult organism. Simulated populations. As in (ii), but here one wants to be able to see what's going on in each cell as an adult organism moves through a simulated environment. Reproduction and nervous system processes would be of particular interest. It seems to me that (i) would be a straightforwardly useful resource to create. The relevance of (ii) and (iii) is a little less clear; they would probably be of most interest to people like those over at comp.ai.alife. -mitch http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch .