Explore The Inside Of A Biological Cell In Minecraft

Ever wanted to ride a rollercoaster through the inside of a bacterial cell? Now you can, at least in Minecraft. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign created CraftCells – Minecraft replicas of 3D cell images – and have made them available for anyone to import into their own Minecraft installation.

The idea to create cells in Minecraft came from the observation that the software that scientists use to visualize 3D representations of cells tends to be limited to research labs and require more computing power than people have available at home or at school.

“Currently, there’s no real way for the public to have this three-dimensional visualization of biological cells,” graduate student Kevin Tan told the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign media office.

Minecraft, on the other hand, is widely available and many people have it installed on home or school computers either for game or educational purposes. The game makes it possible to create entire worlds out of virtual building blocks and people have been incredibly creative with it. For example, in 2010 someone created a replica of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek entirely within Minecraft. And now, biophysicists have made giant cells in the virtual world.

The three cells they created are a yeast cell, epithelial cells from breast tissue (with and without cancer), and a “minimally viable” bacterial cell. The latter is a bacterial cell which only has the absolute minimal amount of genes needed to live.

A Minecraft rollercoaster ride through the cell

In the CraftCells project, people can interact with the cells using modified Minecraft tools, to simulate various events that could occur in the cell. They can also ride a rollercoaster inside the bacterial cell.

The 3D replicas also make it more obvious how a breast cancer cell is different from a healthy cell. They show how the cancer cell is more stretched out, and has larger nucleoli structures within the cell nucleus. The nucleoli are areas within the cell nucleus that produce ribosomes which in turn are responsible for making proteins elsewhere in the cell.

“When a cancer cell becomes elongated, that spindle-like morphology is often associated with metastasis — so more aggressive cancers,” Tan says. “And histopathologists often look at the size of the nucleoli as a marker of cancer.”

The researchers published an article last week in which they explain how these Minecraft cells can be used to teach biology concepts. But CraftCells is also useful for scientists who don’t have access to the platforms that help researchers explore 3D structures.

“We’ve learned from the program VMD that it is critical to look at your system in three dimensions to make sure everything makes sense,” says Zane Thornburg who was also involved in creating CraftCells. “And even though VMD is fantastic, nothing gives you the scale like this where you can enter and walk around the entire cell and do so many checks on your system. CraftCells is just another level of 3D exploration that no other scientific tool currently provides.”

To allow others to explore the cells, the researchers made the Minecraft files available via Github, so that anyone can grab them, install them on their own computer and enjoy a rollercoaster ride through the inside of a cell.