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Christian Grove (California Institute of Technology, Arcadia, United States of America)
The organization of biological data into concise, intuitive, and engaging modes of communication will no doubt become an ever increasingly important goal of modern biological and medical sciences. Certainly, visual aids and 3-dimensional computer models will provide useful platforms for studying, as well as annotating, consolidating and exploring large amounts of otherwise unwieldy data. We present here a preliminary 3D visual computer model of the free living nematode (roundworm) Caenorhabditis elegans developed using the open source, Python-based 3D rendering program, Blender. The model is a to-scale rendering of an adult hermaphroditic worm, representing all of the major body tissue types including the skin, muscles, intestine, germline, and nervous system at the resolution of individual cells. C. elegans is an extremely useful model system in which to initiate the development of high-resolution visual models (from cells to molecules) because it has a fixed number of somatic cells (959 somatic nuclei), an invariable cell lineage, a completely mapped neural network consisting of 302 neurons, and comprehensive archives of transmission electron micrographs revealing the location, s