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Science Scribbler
Project avatar for Science Scribbler: Virus Factory

Science Scribbler: Virus Factory

Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!

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Results

Phase 2 Complete!

We are very excited to announce that phase 2 of virus factory is now complete! We want to thank all the volunteers for their dedicated efforts at helping us classify viruses. For us the next stage is to combine the classifications from phase 2 in order to produce a detailed map of the viruses and their likely phase. There are additional volunteer projects that can help us produce this map but in the meantime we have another project starting using 3d volumetric image data from Diamond Light Source that is exploring the causes of Huntington's disease and is going live on Zooniverse in the next few days.

Updated results from Science Scribbler: Virus Factory

The initial analysis of the virus factory data is nearing completion and we are pleased to be able to show some preliminary results from our work. Two key steps of the analysis are illustrated in the figure. The clicks from phase 1 of virus factory were clustered to combine the clicks on different layers (A) Then the classifications from phase 2 were filtered and used to create an initial classification of the viruses in the entire volume (B).

First Results from Science Scribbler: Virus Factory

In the two months since the Science Scribbler: Virus Factory project was launched over 1000 volunteers have contributed more than 90,000 classifications!

The three images shown above provide a first look at some of the results from Science Scribbler: Virus Factory! If you’ve contributed to the project, you will be familiar with the image on the bottom right (labelled ‘C’), which is like those you’ll see when you classify on the project. Each blue blob corresponds to a classification made by a volunteer to mark a virus particle. The image above (marked ‘B’) is a zoomed out version of this, and the image marked A shows about 10,000 classifications across the three dimensional space of the cell– as with the other images, each blue blob represents the location of a virus within the cell.

Studies such as this will help us understand where viruses are located within the cell, which will provide insight about how viruses hijack their host cell’s internal machinery.

Read more about Science Scribbler: Virus Factory or classify here.

Here are some of the previous academic papers we've published about segmentation (the process of marking and labelling areas within 3D volumes):