Figure 3.

Filtering solutions to include only those that match the ranges reported in the literature about worm locomotion on agar. (A) Relative role of the different neuron classes in forward locomotion. Proportion of the forward locomotion speed maintained by each model worm when the neuromuscular junction from the B-class motorneurons (x-axis) or the A-class motorneurons (y-axis) are ablated. See F₂ in section 2 for the measure of locomotion performance. Each point in the figure represents a single solution. Solutions in the shaded region represent those that match the filtering criteria: (1) Ablation to A-class neuromuscular junctions should not impair forward locomotion entirely; and (2) Ablation to B-class neuromuscular junctions should impair forward locomotion performance. (B) Body curvature. Measures of the model worms' body wavelength (x-axis) and their anterior-posterior curvature profile (y-axis) (see Supplementary Material 1 for details). Green shaded areas represent biologically plausible ranges. In the previous two figures, solutions in the darkest shaded region represent those that match both criteria. Histograms are shown for the criteria on each axis. (C) Trajectory curvature. Distribution of the radius of curvature for the trajectories of each model worm in the 2D plane (see Supplementary Material 1 for details). The blue shaded area represents solutions with a relatively straight trajectory. (D) Venn diagram representing the distribution of the 104 selected solutions according to the fulfillment of the three different filters: relative role of different neural classes in red, body curvature in green, and trajectory curvature in blue. We focus our analysis on the 15 solutions that matched all criteria.