Genome Jumper, a mobile game powered by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, invites you to explore the human genome and its variations. From skin and eye color to food preference or disease predisposition - countless features (phenotypes) can be influenced by small changes (variants) in our DNA. Play the game to discover the effects of such changes on your avatar...
Run along the sequence of over 30 genes to collect unique variants and watch your character change accordingly… often with surprising results! The levels of increasing difficulty will require all your dexterity to avoid dangerous falls into non-coding regions and to jump over secondary structures, while collecting as many points as possible.
You will discover 25 characters representing different human populations all around the globe.
The variants illustrated in this game highlight some of the best-known cases associated with a particular phenotypes. Such a link is extremely complicated to establish because there are million of human variants, which, together with environmental and other external factors, establish a unique phenotype. It is the purpose of bioinformaticians and of life scientists to study and to better understand the interaction between all these elements.
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is a non-profit organization federating 70 Swiss research and service groups of experts in bioinformatics. SIB’s 800 scientists join forces to advance research by providing life scientists and clinicians with a state-of-the-art bioinformatics infrastructure, as well as with services, resources, expertise and training.
To celebrate its 20 years of existence in 2018, SIB has launched several original projects, including this game, to promote and explain bioinformatics to the public. Discover all the projects on our website or on our Facebook account.
Note that this game is open source. If you would like to contribute and help with translating in another language, don't hesitate to get in touch with us.
While playing, if you find a bug or typo, please let us know.