Su­per Mario, Su­per Sonic, Para­me­cium!

We reprint this ar­ti­cle from the blog "Mi­cro Writ­ers" by per­mis­sion of its ed­i­tor, Radwa. This blog was ini­ti­ated at Cairo Uni­ver­sity School of Phar­macy and is writ­ten by mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy stu­dents for all mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy stu­dents around the world.

by Radwa Raed Sharaf

What could those three pos­si­bly have in com­mon? Be­lieve it or not, they all play the role of a lead ac­tion fig­ure in kids' video games. Hear­ing the lat­est edi­tion of a Ger­man biotech­nol­ogy news broad­cast, I was sur­prised to learn that re­searchers of the Riedel-Kruse lab at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity have de­vel­oped — what they call — Bi­otic Video Games, where the Para­me­cium are con­trolled and ma­neu­vered about via a joy­stick and man­aged to pub­lish their find­ings in a re­search pa­per!

Source

The de­vice is ba­si­cally com­posed of a fluid com­part­ment, where the Para­me­cium move around and roam about freely. I am sure you are won­der­ing, ex­actly how BIG (small) is a para­me­cium. Well, it is so small, mak­ing it ac­tu­ally dif­fi­cult to ob­serve by the naked eye. But no wor­ries! They can be seen quite clearly on your screen, while you're play­ing, thanks to the pro­vided mi­cro­scope cam­era, which is con­nected to elec­trodes and sup­plies you with a live feed, be­ing su­per­im­posed on the flash game board onto your screen. The joy­stick is ca­pa­ble of cre­at­ing a weak elec­tric field, which in­flu­ences the di­rec­tion of their move­ment, as you wish.

Eight dif­fer­ent games have been de­vel­oped and given quite funny names, as Cil­i­a­ball, Pac-medium, Mi­crobash, and Pond Pong. For in­stance, in one game ver­sion, the player needs to move about the Para­me­cium to score a soc­cer goal. To help you eas­ier imag­ine this, take a look at this 3‑part video.

As Riedel-Kruse put it, these games serve two ul­ti­mate goals: First, to awaken the sci­en­tific in­ter­est in those young kids and teenagers, hope­fully mo­ti­vat­ing them to some­day pur­sue a ca­reer, head­ing off in that di­rec­tion. And af­ter all, sci­en­tists can col­lect and an­a­lyze in­for­ma­tion about those tiny or­gan­isms, whilst play­ing with them.

 

Ref­er­ence

Riedel-Kruse IH, Chung AM, Dura B, Hamil­ton AL, Lee BC. 2011. De­sign, en­gi­neer­ing and util­ity of bi­otic games. Lab Chip, 11 (1), 14−22. PMID 21085736

 

Radwa Raed Sharaf

Radwa Raed Sharaf did her master's in mol­e­c­u­lar med­i­cine and is now pur­su­ing her PhD at Har­vard study­ing vi­ral im­munol­ogy.

 

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