Students Design Game of Life :: Wessex Scene Online

Students Design Game of Life

5th October 2009
Claire Scott

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Oct 09 - Solar Neutrino Lecture
Oct 09 - The new Mountbatten opens
Oct 09 - Weird and Wacky Science Honoured
Oct 09 - Supersonic Record Attempt
Nov 09 - Graduates in Demand

iGEM is an exciting and fast expanding international undergraduate competition.

It stems from the novel field of Synthetic Biology, with the aim to produce novel biological life forms. The competition is designed to introduce the primary concepts underlying Synthetic Biology.

Each team participating in the competition is sent an identical kit of varying biological parts, BioBricks, to create a living, working system. After a hectic summer in the lab creating the system, the teams congregate at the Jamboree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to present their results, and be judged on their findings.

Back at Southampton University, we have focused on the quorum sensing mechanism in bacteria. Quorum sensing can define the process whereby when activated by a stimulus, bacteria give out a standard signal response. This allows for communication within the population. Using this method of bacterial communication, we have designed two systems which demonstrate the classic games ‘Rock-Paper-Scissors’ and ‘Conway’s Game of Life’.

John Conway’s Game of Life is a popular representation of cellular automata, a model that can be programmed to show a specific movement or behaviour of a bacterium. Once initiated, the simulation proceeds without further input. Our aim is to utilize the basic idea of the Game to develop a system involving two separate plasmids, vectors arising from DNA molecules in bacteria, which are separate to the chromosomal DNA. These cells will then fluoresce, imitating the game. When one cell is turned ‘on’, e.g. once it fluoresces, it should then turn on other cells surrounding it, which will initiate a chain reaction. Therefore we should be able to initiate and therefore control the creation of patterns produced by the oscillating bacteria.

Everyone knows the popular game Rock-Paper-Scissors, whereby the players aim to produce a gesture that will defeat that of their opponent. Our parallel project is to re-create this idea within the bacteria E. coli, by coordinating the communication between three different bacterial cells. Each bacterium should be able to disable the primary plasmid of a specific opponent cell, e.g. paper over rock, scissors over paper etc., whilst simultaneously enduring the attacks of their rival cells. Each bacteria will fluoresce a different colour, like rock will show as red, and as each bacteria ‘loses’ the colour expression will turn off, theoretically resulting in one colour remaining.

We are aiming to receive a gold medal at the competition Jamboree, one of the requirements involving the production of an entirely novel BioBrick. Sounds relatively simple, however we have spent two weeks on this one part so far and have still yet to accomplish it!

We will only find out the outcome of all our effort after the Jamboree at the end of October, until then, our progress can be tracked via our Wikipedia page: http://2009.igem.org/Team:Southampton