Team:Paris Bettencourt/The Smell Game

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Introduction

This year, five students from the MSc of BioInformatics & Genomics of the University of Rennes 1 tried to inaugurate the first iGEM team from their university. However, being the first is always fraught with challenges and ultimately, they were not able have their own team this year. The Rennes University students wanted to participate in iGEM to learn about synthetic biology. The team viewed synthetic biology as a scientific discipline with a lot of potential, but still in the nascent stage of development. So they were still determined still participate! These five students asked us (iGEM Paris-Bettencourt team) for advice and found that the Rennes students had computational skills that we lacked. Thus began a mutually beneficial collaboration, which lead to the development of the online program "SmellGame" within the Citizen Science part of Human Practices of iGEM Bettencourt.



Motivation

The Rennes team was motivated to create a web platform to generate, store, and analyze data for the following reasons:

  • The project idea is at the intersection of citizen science and big data: it is a perfect case study in the context of the current concerns in Bioinformatics.
  • Enhanced the teams ability to develop web platforms.
  • Opportunity to learn new web development tools and professional competencies (Python & Django, JavaScript, Git/GitHub, …).
  • The ability to create web tools to analyze data that are fully embedded in the project.

TEAM PROJECT
University of Rennes (France)

The Smell Game was developped, with the Paris-Bettencourt team, by a team from Rennes. This team includes three computational biologists (Florian Thonier, Lucas Le Lann and Nathan Foulquier), and two bio-informaticians (Arnaud Ferré and Jean Coquet). They started this project two month ago after several meeting with the Paris-Bettencourt team. They build this team because of their interest in synthetic biology.

ARNAUD FERRE
Team-leader

I am an old student with two degrees: one in software & project engineering and one in bioinformatics for genomics. I want to work in biotechnology, because of their high interdisciplinary aspect and their potential to improve our (very near) future society. The first time that I heard about synthetic biology, I was immediately motivated by learn skills about this, and iGEM is for me the best way to achieve it. It is also a huge opportunity to meet people who have the same passion for science as me, and who want to act. My main focus in the platform is to organize the programming part and to contribute to the realization of the SmellGame platform.

FLORIAN THONIER
Bioinformatician

Recently I graduated from the Rennes 1 University (France) was a degree in Bioinformatics and genomics. I'm passionate about informatics and its potential to facilitate new research, particularly in biology. I’m part of this project to learn new methodologies and learn about synthetic biology. I learned that synthetic biology is a domain for new research to respond to the goals of tomorrow in everyday life. I also learned a lot by working with researchers from many different backgrounds

JEAN COQUET
Bioinformatician

I'm a first year Ph.D student from university of Rennes (FRANCE). I studied the "Semantic-based reasoning for biological pathways analysis" (my thesis subject) at Irisa/Inria in Rennes. I obtained a bachelor degree in Computer Science then I decided to go to the BioInformatics way. I’m really happy to participate of synthetic biology project because this domain possibilities are exciting. Specifically, I participated in developing SmellGame platform.

LUCAS LE LANN
Bioinformatician

I have a Master degree in Bioinformatics. My speciality is genetic and microbiology. I wanted to take part in this synthetic biology project because I enjoy interdisciplinarity. Furthermore, I think synthetic biology can be useful to everyday life as well as bigger projects. The Smell game project allow me to improve my computing and teamwork skills.

NATHAN FOULQUIER
Bioinformatician

I am a 23 years old engineer in bioinformatics and I started iGEM 2014 when I was still a student at Universitée Rennes 1. While I was finishing my studies I felt the need to involve myself into a concrete project at the interface of informatics and biology. I was really interested by the spirit of innovation carried by iGEM in the field of Synthetic biology and thought that I may contribute to the projects of Paris Bettencourt iGEM team with my own skills. I believe the next revolutions in Science will take place in organisations like iGEM.

Aims

This platform has three concrete aims:

  • To Develop a game for people to characterize smell samples (sweat or artificial odor) with respect to intensity and pleasantness.
  • To create a database that stores the results from game and connects those smell results to the pertinent information from people who give a sample of their own sweat.
  • To generate graphical results from all precedent data, updated dynamically from the database.

Results

The web platform continues to evolve, mostly thanks to the people who give their samples and play the game. At this time, users can give a sample of his own sweat, play with the samples of others and then obtain a position of their smell.
The SmellGame project relies on a web platform available at:
http://smellofus.synbio4all.org.
Join us and play!



Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI)
Faculty of Medicine Cochin Port-Royal, South wing, 2nd floor
Paris Descartes University
24, rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques
75014 Paris, France
+33 1 44 41 25 22/25
paris-bettencourt-igem@googlegroups.com
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