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FuncEWOrm

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FuncEWOrm /

We’re building the first cellular and molecular blueprint of an entire organism by uniting cutting-edge multimodal data across time.
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Project Overview
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Biology is inherently dynamic, yet most cellular and molecular datasets capture only a single timepoint or isolated tissue, usually for groups of cells outside of their endogenous context—limiting our ability to identify fundamental biological principles that govern development and aging in living organisms. This project addresses that gap by systematically mapping cellular and subcellular ultrastructure of an entire organism in its native state over time. 

We will combine these ultrastructural datasets with single-cell genomic and proteomic information. This will result in the first time-resolved, multimodal dataset with single cell resolution - and the first across the lifespan - of any organism, providing an unprecedented opportunity to reveal fundamental principles of cellular self-organization as an organism develops and ages. This wealth of data will be useful as an unbiased hypothesis generator for biological systems and as the foundation for building AI models to integrate multimodal datasets. C. elegans is uniquely suited due to its cell identifiability across multiple data modalities and time. We plan to extend these datasets as new technologies emerge.

Janelia’s FuncEWOrm project is building the first cellular and molecular blueprint of an entire organism, C. elegans, by uniting multimodal data across time. Data acquisition and analysis at HHMI-Janelia by the FuncEWOrm project team, the Hari Shroff lab, the Jan Funke lab, the Meng Wang lab, and the CellMap Project Team in collaboration with Daniel Colòn-Ramos lab and Oliver Hobert lab. Video by Philip Hubbard, Molly Reilly.