World Particle Project

The World Particle Project (WPP) is a planned catalog of the signals that particles make as they pass through nanopores. Molecular Reality Corporation proposed it, and the volunteers of its Molecular Streaming Corps are meant to fill it. The company's December 2022 technical overview defines it as "a comprehensive catalog of particles in terms of size, shape, charge, and other characteristics, indexed by biological source and, with environmental samples, GPS-tagging".^[1] The members' help file calls it an effort "to create the planet's largest, most diverse, open-access database of molecular translocation signatures", fed by players "analyzing local water, soil, air, and food".^[2] In company materials for the character Maxine it is "a giant global map of Unidentified Signal Producing Events", recorded by players who collect water, dirt and breath, and it "serves as your neural-training 'diet.'"^[3]

The overview introduces the project in a section on the tools players would use at home to check their results, and says they would "catalog analyte signals from everything, everywhere", including "GPS tagged environmental samples and biofluid samples from everywhere in the global biome". At first the catalog "will simply comprise cataloging signals from mostly unidentified particles, and further along, it will include actually identifying the sources of those signals."^[1] The company's memo on the first games of Maxine's Quest opens with the same ambition, a "comprehensive cataloging of cells, particles, and molecules", and gives the environmental title, Raindrop Planet, "GPS-tagged soil, water, and filtered atmosphere samples" and "sea monkeys" as analytes.^[4] See Early Releases on Maxine's Quest.

The scientific claim that the overview attaches to the project concerns microbes. "Using these signals, we believe our players will be the first to name many microorganisms known only through DNA sequences, without physical measurements or sightings." Of "the more than 50,000 metagenomically identified microorganisms", it says, "only a small number have ever been cultured or physically characterized, including almost 2,000 different microbial species in the human gut alone."^[1]

Organisms known only from their DNA have been a feature of microbiology since sequencing was applied to whole environments. A 2004 survey of seawater from the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda produced 1.045 billion base pairs of sequence, more than 1.2 million previously unknown genes, and at least 1,800 genomic species, 148 of them bacterial types not seen before.^[5] Naming such organisms was the harder step. The existing code for prokaryotes asks for a pure culture, which most microbes lack, and in 2022 a group of microbiologists published the SeqCode, a separate code that treats a genome sequence as the type of a species.^[6] What the WPP would add is a physical measurement beside the sequence: the depth of a pulse in a pore reports the volume of the particle, and the transit time depends on its size and charge, the quantities named in the definition (Coulter principle).

A draft of the company's Disclosure Crawl gives the project a game of its own, the "World Particle Project Explorer". Players take a device to local water, soil and "even swab their own (sterilized!) kitchen counters" and score for each unique signal, a game it calls "USPE Pokémon". Later, "GPS-tagged data populates a global heat map of molecular diversity" and community challenges ask players to "Correlate specific USPE clusters with local pollen counts or pollution levels." The last stage is "discovering and formally characterizing (with core lab support) novel microbial species or environmental contaminants, with Player Scientists credited."^[7]

The company's critique of its own machine-learning plans treats the project as the source of the training data and the test of any claim. It names "the class diversity of a planetary, GPS-tagged World Particle Project" as part of the company's "moat", and it allows a signal to count as new only when it recurs "across dozens of different GPS-tagged devices".^[8] A signal depends on the pore as much as on the particle, so the same critique proposes that a model's representation of each signal be split into two parts, one for the analyte and one for the instrument that recorded it.

In 2026 the WPP was a quest in the member software, worth 1,000 XP. Its text read: "Start curating and collecting samples for molecular streaming experiments. Got freezer space? Get in touch! What would you like to focus on collecting?"^[9] The company's guide of August 2026 said that the Corps was not recruiting.^[10]

• Citizen science
• Microbiome
• Nucleic Acid Observatory
• Utility-scale molecular sensing