Over the past 50 years, the C. elegans community has excelled at cataloguing and distilling vast quantities of data into succinct yet comprehensive summaries: the cell lineage, the anatomical parts list, the neural wiring diagram, the genome database. Out of technological necessity, these cornerstones of the worm knowledge base are generally accessed in text-based or 2-dimensional still-image formats. Correlations among members of these sets and details of their spatio-temporal arrangements are often left to the individual researcher's intuition, imagination, or further experimentation. The WormGUIDES EmbryoAtlas integrates a variety of cell-specific data into a visually intuitive multidimensional exploration/understanding interface that, by definition, can only be conveyed poorly in this abstract. Nuclei of embryonic cells are plotted within a freely rotatable, time-animated model of the developing embryo. Each nucleus can be queried by the user for its identity and for information about its ancestry, fate, and function. Conversely, the viewer can easily compose scenes in which specific sublineages and/or cells with common fates and/or precursors of specific organs and/or cell-by-cell gene-expression patterns are simultaneously highlighted within the interactive 4-D model. Moreover, any scene from a single user's screen can be instantly shared with collaborators or published as a URL web-link. And there's an app for that: Android (available April 2013). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wormguides.embryoatlas iOS (coming Spring 2013). https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/embryoatlas/id635126084?ls=1&mt=8 Java for Windows/Mac/Linux (coming Summer 2013)
http://www.wormguides.org/launch.