Team:Wellesley TheTech/Project/Digital

BAC PACK

• TEAM
  • Members
  • Notebooks
  • Acknowledgements
• PROJECT
  • Overview
  • Digital Component
  • Wetlab Component
  • Background
  • Hardware
• HUMAN PRACTICES
  • Practices
  • Methodology
  • Collaboration
• MEDAL FULFILLMENT

DIGITAL COMPONENT

The digital side of BacPack provides museum visitors with the opportunity to tinker with various tangible representations of existing BioBricks and design bacteria in a virtual environment.

Even though the project was developed on the MultiTaction cell, it is compatible with any multitouch surface the supports similar functionality and has the Cornerstone SDK installed. All of the code is available for download, and can be exported for any hardware, including desktop computers.

Design and Layout

Each screen is divided into four work areas, allowing for collaboration in the design process. Each user group has their own individual petri dish area, where they can insert genes into a bacterium and follow the steps to deploy their engineered bacteria to the environment. The top central part of the screen contains the testing environment (Mars, Antarctica, the Deep Sea). There is a status bar at the very top of the screen, which displays the current needs of the environment.

Example Interaction

The main interaction is broken down into the concrete procedural steps:

1. Selecting a combination of an "input" gene and an "output" gene.
2. Placing the genes into a petri dish to insert into a plasmid, which then enters the bacterium.
3. Dragging the bacterium into a flask, where it can multiply to create a colony.
4. Dragging the flask containing the engineered bacterial colony to the environment, which deploys the colony to the appropriate resource area.
5. After the bacteria are successfully deployed, the status bar updates reflecting the bacteria's output.

Feedback

Even though the digital interaction is an abstracted and simplified representation of the synthetic biology process, we incorporate the idea of scientific validity through the use of feedback messages. While users can create any combination of input and output gene and create a “valid” plasmid, some such combination result in an inefficient solution for producing resources, such as producing food out of ice. In such cases, the program displays a warning message and does not allow the user to deploy their bacteria, instead urging them to try a different combination of genes.

Tips and Guidance

To facilitate users through the process and interaction, a tab containing information on what to do next is available next to each petri dish. The information dynamically updates as the user makes progress towards deploying their engineered bacteria to the environment, and reflects any successes or failures.

Gene Background Information

To add a layer of complexity to the interaction, users have the opportunity to learn more about the genes they are playing with. In the information box next to each petri dish is a tab that has further information about each of the tangibly represented BioBricks, including its origin and iGEM team that worked with that part.

Information about iGEM

The information box also offers an iGEM tab, which plays an educational video about iGEM and basic synthetic biology concepts. The video was developed by the French IONIS teams for iGEM 2015, and is part of our collaborative outreach.