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.
SIB is an internationally recognized non-profit organization, dedicated to biological and biomedical data science. Our data scientists are passionate about creating knowledge and solving complex questions in many fields, from biodiversity and evolution to medicine. They provide essential databases and software platforms as well as bioinformatics expertise and services to academic, clinical, and industry groups. SIB federates the Swiss bioinformatics community of some 900 scientists, encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing. The institute contributes to keeping Switzerland at the forefront of innovation by fostering progress in biological research and enhancing health. This game was launched in 2018 to celebrate the institute's 20th anniversary and to promote bioinformatics to a broad, non-specialist audience.
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.