Team
We are a team of seven highly motivated Bachelor- and Master Students at the ETH Zurich pursuing various fields such as Biotechnology, Biomedical Engineering, Neurobiology and Bioinformatics. The iGEM project is carried out at one of the youngest departments of ETHZ located in Basel-Department of Biosystems, Science and Engineering - flourishing in interdisciplinary biological research. If you're around Basel, make sure to visit our team's lab to play the bio-game Colisweeper!

From Minesweeper to Colisweeper
We aspire to incorporate all features of the computer game Minsweeper into the biological game Colisweeper. The minefield is replaced by mine and non-mine colonies on an agar plate. Quorum sensing molecule AHL communicates between colonies which are designed to express different orthogonal hydrolases depending on the signal processed. By pipetting a colorless multi-substrate mix onto the colonies, color appears which indicates the next logical move for the player. If you are certain of a mine colony, you can use a second substrate solution to flag the mine.

Information Processing
Our non-mine cells are designed to distinguish between different concentrations of AHL that helps translate this information into expression of different sets of hydrolases. They are equipped with mutated LuxR promoters with different AHL sensitivities which serve as highpass filters. The promoters were created using site-saturation mutagenesis. Through mutation of the LuxR binding sites the AHL affinities were tuned successfully.

Hydrolase Reactions
Enabling a fast interaction with our system, the hydrolytic enzymes generated as a signal response are an important feature of our game. We used alkaline phosphatase (phoA), β-galactosidase (lacZ), acetylesterase (aes), β-N-Acetylglucosaminidase (nagZ) and β-glucuronidase (gusA) and their respective substrates to achieve fast and colorful outputs.

The Model
We constantly tried to validate and improve our system using a spatio-temporal model.

Experiments
Starting with characterization of the AHL diffusion in agar plates we soon went on to test different sender- and receiver-cell set ups using GFP as a readable output. In parallel, the promoter mutagenesis and screening, as well as the testing and characterizing of different substrates on the hydrolases was done.

Human practices
As a continuation of our laboratory project we analyzed the relationship between synthetic biology and games. For one thing synthetic biology can be used to play common games in a new way, possibly for educational purposes or as a basis for proof-of-principle experiments for new circuits. More recently synthetic biologists also started to use games as a research tool, an innovative approach to make use of crowdsourcing and distributed computing. We want to find correlations and discuss possible consequences for Synthetic Biology.