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Team:Paris Bettencourt/Citizen Science
From 2014.igem.org
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Introduction
Body odor is a unique characteristic of each individual. Our body aroma is extremely complex and previous studies showed that this odor is influenced by many parameters, including lifestyle, diet, gender, and age. However, the relationship between these parameters and the body odor remain unclear. To assess this relationship, we chose a crowdsourcing approach, which has been shown to be successful in the past (ref: foldit) for big data scientific studies. In this process the general public can participate both by giving data and by analyzing them. While helping with the project, they learn about their own odor, and synthetic biology.
Aims
- Getting Citizen Scientists involved: General public can be involved by either giving samples and/or by analyzing them through an online game called “The Smell Game”. - Collecting and analyzing armpit smell samples: The volunteers placed cotton pads under their armpits for a specified amount of time and filled a form with information about their lifestyle, diet, gender and age. - Developing an online game to analyze the samples and learn more about the microbiome: The participants use our online platform to analyze samples that have been given by other participants. People will assess their personal impression of the fragrance of the different samples. The final aim is to give users the analysis of their personal odor provided by others participants. - Study how emotions can affect body odor: Taking samples of volunteers before and after watching a horror movie and making a smell test to determine if there is a significant change in their body odor.
Results
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Achievements
Overall we had more than 600 participations from all around the world (France, Poland, Colombia, Israel, UK). The ages of the volunteers were from 5 to 65 years old. We hosted several smell events where Citizen Scientists were able to learn about and participate in our project. One of these was at the 'Cité des Sciences' (a science museum in Paris) called “Parfums Microbiens”. During three days we held up a stand where anyone could come and participate in our study. We had posters and gave explanations about the relationship between our odor and our microbiome. During this event we collected around a hundred samples and analysis of smells.
+33 1 44 41 25 22/25
paris-bettencourt-igem@googlegroups.com 
