E. lemming 2D (iGem 2010)

An example movie of the E. lemming 2D game developed as part of the ETH Zurich iGem 2010 project.
The iGem project of the ETH was to control the swimming of E. coli cells by repressing or inducing tumbling by applying short red or far-red light pulses. While part of the project was to develop a controller which directs the E. coli cell in a user defined direction, in the game the player takes direct control over the light pulses, thus influencing the movement of one E. coli cell, the E. lemming.
The goal of the game is to hunt and eliminate other, hostile E. coli cells. The game can either be played with real synthetically engineered E. coli cells by connecting to a motorized microscope, or by using the for the project constructed model to simulate the movement of the E. lemming and its opponents. In both cases, several graphical effects are added to the real or generated microscope images to realize the "shooting" and to make the cells better distinguishable from each other and the background.
We developed this game to make bacterial chemotaxis in general, and our project in special, intuitively understandable for people from Synthetic Biology as well as for a broader audience.
The game is open source and can be downloaded free of charge from our team's wiki page at http://2010.igem.org/Team:ETHZ_Basel .

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• E. lemming
• iGem
• chemotaxis
• bacterial movement
• phototaxis
• ETH
• ETH Zurich
• ETH Zürich
• synthetic biology
• light receptor