Towards an Electro-optical Emulation of the C. elegans Connectome

The tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans features one of the simplest nervous systems in nature. The hermaphrodite contains exactly 302 neurons and about 8000 connections. The Si elegans project aims at providing a reverse-engineerable model of this nematode by emulating its nervous system in hardware and embodying it in a virtual world. The hardware will consist of 302 individual FPGAs, each carrying a neuron-specific neural response model. The FPGA neurons will be interconnected by an electro-optical connectome to distribute the signal at the axonal output or gap-junction pin of an FPGA neuron onto the respective synaptic input or gap-junction pins of those target FPGA neurons that a neuron interconnects with. This technology will replicate the known connectome of the nematode to allow for an as biologically meaningful as possible and truly parallel information flow between neurons. This article focuses on the concepts and first implementation steps of such optical connectome.