The flash game Pandemic 2 let's YOU be the infectious disease!

To effectively fight any enemy, you have to understand it first. This is one of the most basic principles when you are trying to prevent infectious diseases. But every disease and its causative agent are different. Modes of infection, transmission, outside host survivability, symptoms and especially the underlying molecular biology is hard to pin down and explain with only one model. But there are still a couple of basic principles that are very nicely illustrated in the game Pandemic 2 below.

In this game you take on the role of an infectious disease. You can choose between being a virus, bacteria or a parasite (no fungi though, sorry). Then you are directly thrown on a world map. Congratulations, you just infected your first human in a random region of the world. Each region is characterized by a set of variables and measures taken by the government to control your disease. Many regions have ship yards and airports that are instrumental in spreading the infection. Also, national water supplies and hospitals are important factors.

While randomly occuring natural disasters helps you, governments will  hinder you by taking increasingly drastic measures.

The effectiveness of your disease depends basically on three variables. Lethality does exactly what it says on the box, a measure of how fast your disease kills an average human. Infectivity tells you how well the disease is transmitted and spreads through a population. Finally, Visibility determines how fast authorities react to your disease by closing airports, harbors, public transport and so on. For example, in the games term, the Ebola virus would have a high lethality, a medium infectivity but it would be very visible while HIV/AIDS would have a low visibility with medium infectivity and lethality. You can increase these variables by buying new traits with evolution points that are awarded for meeting certain milestones (number of infected, spread to a new region etc.).

Buying new symptoms, resistances and ways of transmission will affect the three key variables in different ways.

The game is relatively straight forward and has a good tutorial so just give it a try and see how you do. But it makes you realize how easily diseases can develop and spread. You also notice how hard the job of national and international health organizations like the WHO is to actually contain and combat a disease. So next time someone asks you what you did in your coffee break, just say you wiped out mankind. But remember, Madagaskar is always the hardest place to get. Enjoy!

Playing with DNA can be fun!

Happy New Year to everyone and although it is a little late (I know, I know) I thought we start it with a play section again. I am sure there was an uproar among all the geneticists that I choose a protein game for the first play post and not something with DNA. Also, the last game was a bit on the complicated side so today I want to introduce you to Phylo.

Phylo is a small flash game written by researchers from McGill University. They gave an important tool of genetic scientists, the so called Multiple Sequence Alignments, a bit more playful note. Multiple Sequence Alignments are used to see how similiar sequences from different species are and are therefore used to construct a tree of life starting from the origin of life. By seeing how similar sequences are, the relationship of species is revealed and how on species evolved out of another.



Since DNA is only composed of the four bases (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymidine), Phylo replaces these building blocks by colored bricks. Your task is now to align two or more sequences to each other in that way that gaps in the sequence are minimized and a maximum of bricks of the same color are aligned. The program automatically scores you against a target value.

Normally this is done by computers which are good for a random aligning brute force approach but the human mind is a master in pattern recognition. Sometimes people can score higher than the computer just by intuition and a general feeling of what looks right. So to avoid spending an ungodly amount of money, they just harvest your free brainpower when you are taking a break and just wanna play something. So give it a try and see if you can help science in your lunch break.