The idea of Minecraft is simple. Create your own constructions using blocks by moving them from one site to another in a 3D virtual world.

This idea has catch more than 34 million players that are moving around, manipulating their space in order to build everything that comes out from their imagination.

We also wanted to create our dream: SynBiocraft mod

From an engineering point of view, Minecraft is just a huge 3D matrix where every cell can contain a lot of information. With a little knowledge of java language, the blocks inside the game can be modified; more kinds of blocks can be created, and the most important, more different traits can be implemented to those blocks. This allowed us to implement Synthetic Biology inside the game.

DNA pieces, machines, DNA ligation, Petri dishes… this powerful tool provides all possibilities to recreate the practices that can be done in a lab without spending material and without having to wait days in order to carry the experiment out. In fact, ligations always occur, no mistakes, no one opens your termocycler while the ligation is being carried out and plasmid insertions are always done correctly, there are always white colonies.

We implemented:

DNA blocks with the information of the FASTA files.

That can be joined in Transcription units (if the construction makes no sense they are transformed in a “BAD DNA block”). For the creation of the TU, it is needed the usage of a termocycler

Bad DNA block

Those transcription units can be joined in the different parts of our project

DNA Constructions:

Toggle Rojo

Toggle Azul

Producto Toggle rojo 1

Producto toggle rojo 2

Producto Toggle Rojo

Producto Toggle azul 1

Producto Toggle azul 2

Producto Toggle azul

Pack Colores 1

Pack colores 2

Pack colores

Circuito 1

Circuito 2

Circuito 3

Circuito semifinal

Circuito semifinal 2

Circuito Final Final: This is our final circuit, needs to be electroporated and cell cultured in a Petri dish in order to infiltrate it into a plant.

Lab machines implemented are:

Electroporator at 1440 mW

This is the intensity needed in order to insert plasmids in Agrobacterium tumefaciens.

BioBricks termocycler

Standard for iGEM DNA assembly. It allows binary joining in the DNA.

Golden Gate termocycler

Standard for DNA assembly in plants. It allows joining promoter, CDS and terminator.

Golden Braid termocycler

Standard for DNA assembly in plants. It allows the union of transcription units and constructions.

Petri dishes

And do not forget the Petri dishes! If you have done it correctly and the piece of DNA is electroporated, you will obtain white colonies that can be taken with a syringe and inserted into one of our plants in order to create a light sensitive GMO. By using our light sticks, it will change to one color or another.

And it does not stop there!

We have also implemented Cholerae in Minecraft, and the only method to obtain the vaccine is by creating the green flower.

Will you survive this new challenge?

Implementing our project inside the game has not been easy, but it has taught us that Minecraft is more powerful than we expected. So, why should we stop there?

By using a DNA database and BioBricks assembly method, we have reached the next level, we have recreated a represilator that was created by Elowitz & Liebler in 2000 and also the SEXY Plant project (Valencia_UPV 2014). But this can be expanded to all BioBricks database. We expect that, in the future, you will be able to replicate all the projects that have already been done in iGEM competition.

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