Team:Paris Bettencourt/The Smell Game

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".

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 competancies (Python & Django, Git/GitHub, …).
• The ability to create web tools to analyze data that are fully embedded in the project.

Aims

This platform has three concrete aims:

• 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.
• Opportunity to learn new web development tools and professional competancies (Python & Django, Git/GitHub, …).
• To generate graphical results from all precedent data, updated dynamically from the database.

Results

The web platform continues to evolve, in part thank to people who give and play with it. The SmellGame project relies on a web platform available here