Classified as a nematode, the roundworm caenorhabditis elegans (or c. elegans to its friends) might seem like just another tiny thing to someone who's not looking at the current research around AI and neural network technology.

But in many key ways, this organism has become the mascot for groundbreaking research in mimicking biological systems.

I've been reading a lot about this tiny worm, so let's go through some of the interesting facts about its anatomy, and its role in technology development.

First, the c. elegans has no circulatory or respiratory system. It does however, have a reproductive system, and males have a particular apparatus for that purpose. Here's more from Wikipedia, for anatomy nerds:

"Males have a single-lobed gonad, a vas deferens, and a tail specialized for mating, which incorporates spicules. Hermaphrodites have two ovaries, oviducts, and spermatheca, and a single uterus."

Despite so many differences in the c. elegans anatomy from anything mammalian, this sounds pretty involved!

Also, the worm has no pancreas, or liver, or blood, for that matter.

It has an interesting system of movement characterized this way, again, from the wiki:

"The four bands of muscles that run the length of the body are connected to a neural system that allows the muscles to move the animal's body only as dorsal bending or ventral bending, but not left or right, except for the head, where the four muscle quadrants are wired independently from one another. When a wave of dorsal/ventral muscle contractions proceeds from the back to the front of the animal, the animal is propelled backwards. When a wave of contractions is initiated at the front and proceeds posteriorly along the body, the animal is propelled forwards. Because of this dorsal/ventral bias in body bends, any normal living, moving individual tends to lie on either its left side or its right side when observed crossing a horizontal surface. A set of ridges on the lateral sides of the body cuticle, the alae, is believed to give the animal added traction during these bending motions."

All of that might make us think that this creature could be a model for some kinds of robotics, too! Anyway...

There are 302 neurons in c. elegans' body. That's going to be significant as we go forward in talking about its research potential. Here's what the same source has to say about the nature of c. elegans cognition at a neural level:

"Many neurons contain dendrites which extend from the cell to receive neurotransmitters or other signals, and a process that extends to the nerve ring ... for a synaptic connection with other neurons. C. elegans has excitatory cholinergic and inhibitory GABAergic motor neurons which connect with body wall muscles to regulate movement. In addition, these neurons and other neurons such as interneurons use a variety of neurotransmitters to control behaviors."

Now let's get to some of the interesting research done on c. elegans in aid of developing digital neural networks:

The first thing to know is that teams are working on developing new kinds of neural nets called liquid networks, based on the anatomy and neural structure of c. elegans.

I've been writing about this for a while, and I'm actually affiliated with the group of researchers working on this, as some of them come from our own MIT CSAIL lab.

The second interesting fact is that research was being done on this worm long before the liquid AI people got involved.

A fellow named Sydney Brenner, a South African Nobel Prize winner, started working on c. elegans back in the 1960s, using that particular organism as a model for neural activity, partly because of its simple anatomical model and convenient availability for research.

Beyond that, we get into the nuts and bolts of how the liquid network systems work, which I've covered in other articles. In a basic sense, these networks are able to adjust for new information in ways that traditional networks are not.

But in some ways, it all goes back to studying these tiny little creatures.

That leads me to one more fact: c. elegans are considered to be microscopic.

This, despite the fact that they are up to 1 mm in length- so they're kind of right on the cusp. If they were round instead of worm-like and clear, we just might be able to spot them against a white background. In reality, though, you're never going to lay on one of these critters unless you have a microscope.

That's a little bit about how biology is informing science today. It's really pretty exciting, and it's sort of under the radar when it comes to much of the new work that's being done. Look for more as we convene our fall conferences and get a lot of the experts together to discuss where we're going next.