Interactive map of the whole nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans — 302 neurons, their muscles, and every synapse between them. Static, offline-capable, and every view is a link.
- Two layouts. Layered — sensory → polymodal → interneurons → motor → muscle, sorted by ganglion inside each column. Force-directed — a deterministic Fruchterman-Reingold run, identical on every machine and every reload.
- Chemical synapses and gap junctions are told apart: directed grey lines with arrow heads versus undirected dashed amber ones. Line width grows with the logarithm of the synapse count.
- Focus. Click a cell — or type its name — and it lights up together with its first-order
neighbours while the rest of the graph fades. A class name works too:
ASHselects both ASHL and ASHR. Click again, pressEsc, or hit Clear to drop the selection. - Connection list. Every incoming, outgoing and electrical connection of the selected cell, heaviest first. Clicking a row moves the selection there.
- Filters. Cell types, connection kinds, and a minimal-weight slider that thins the graph down to its backbone.
- Signal paths. Pick two cells and see up to three shortest chains of chemical synapses between
them, at most five hops long —
ASH → AVAshows the escape response,ASH → dBWML8follows it all the way into a body wall muscle. - Shareable state. Layout, focus, filters and the path endpoints all live in the address, so a link restores exactly what you were looking at.
- Offline. A service worker caches the app; after the first visit it works with the network off.
| Focus on a neuron class | Force-directed layout |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| What | Source |
|---|---|
| Synapses and gap junctions | Cook S.J. et al. Whole-animal connectomes of both Caenorhabditis elegans sexes. Nature 571, 63–71 (2019) — doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1352-7, hermaphrodite whole-animal edge list as republished by OpenWorm c302 |
| Cell function classes, neurotransmitters | owmeta export shipped with c302, based on WormAtlas |
| Ganglion membership, soma coordinates | WormAtlas, as packaged by wormneuroatlas |
| Cell descriptions | WormAtlas, as packaged by OpenWorm ConnectomeToolbox |
The graph holds 450 cells — 302 neurons plus 148 muscles and other end organs — with 4681 chemical synapses and 1359 gap junctions. Neuron classes are derived from the names themselves rather than a hand-written table, and the converter refuses to emit a dataset that does not come out at 302 neurons in 118 classes.
Nothing is fetched at runtime: the whole dataset is compiled into the bundle. See
scripts/README.md for how to refresh it from the sources.
index.html entry point
worm.view.* the application shell — header, stage, footer, URL state
graph/ the connectome as a graph: parsing, layouts, shortest paths, tests
plot/ the canvas: drawing, panning, zooming, hit testing
panel/ filters, signal path picker, legend
detail/ connection list of the selected cell
slider/ a native range input, $mol has no slider of its own
hue/ the shared cell colour palette
data/ connectome.json plus the generated data.ts compiled into the bundle
scripts/ the CSV to JSON converter and its vendored sources
PRD.md the product requirements this was built from
The app is a MAM module written in $mol.
Clone it into a MAM workspace as bog/worm, then:
npm start bog/worm # dev server on http://localhost:9080/bog/worm/
node bog/worm/-/node.test.js # unit tests
node scripts/build-data.mjs # regenerate data/ from scripts/source/The published bundle is about 440 KB of JavaScript, data included.
MIT, see LICENSE. The connectome data belongs to its authors and is used under the terms of the publications and repositories linked above.