Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 2, numbers 3 and 4, 2010 // View article

A Biologically Accurate Simulation of the Locomotion of Caenorhabditis elegans

Authors:
Roger Mailler
Jacob Graves
Nathan Willy
Trevor Sarratt

Keywords: Simulation, Biology, Caenorhabditis elegans, Modeling

Abstract:
The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is an important model organism for many areas of biological research including genetics, development, and neurobiology. It is the first organism to have its genome sequenced, complete cell ontogeny determined, and nervous system mapped. With all of the information that is available on this simple organism, C. elegans may also become the first organism to be accurately and completely modeled in silico. This work takes a first step toward this goal by presenting a biologically accurate, 3-dimensional simulated model of C. elegans. This model takes into account many facets of the organism including size, shape, weight distribution, muscle placement, and muscle force. It also explicitly models the environment of the worm to include factors such as contact, friction, inertia, surface tension, and gravity. The model was tuned and validated using video recordings taken of the worm to show that it accurately depicts the physics of undulatory locomotion used to forward and reverse crawl on an agar surface. The main contribution of this article is a new, highly detailed 3D physics model and supporting simulator that accurately reproduces the physics of C. elegans locomotion.

Pages: 82 to 93

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2010. Used with permission.

Publication date: April 6, 2011

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660