b.
Drag two sliders on a horizontal sequence to isolate a candidate domain. Simple drag-and-drop, instant visual feedback, local IndexedDB storage. The MVP mechanic from the Gemini engagement report.
Workshop
Touch the matter.
Wikipedia makes you want to wander article to article. Foldit proved that a well-designed puzzle puts a teenager ahead of an algorithm. Bactaegion's Workshop brings together the gestures through which the community touches bacterial defense proteins: drag, lasso, swipe, slider. No blocking tutorial — you'll know what it was after doing the gesture.
Start here
Thirty seconds for the first aha.
Pick a protein below, drag the sliders, isolate a segment that looks coherent to your eye. You've just sketched a domain — the same operation underlying structural model training. No biology required: your eye sees patterns before your intellect names them.
Catalog of gestures
Eight ways to manipulate the living.
Each gesture has a precedent in the scientific discovery games literature. All eight are now live in V1 or V1-simplified.
g.
A characterized bacterial defense operon scrolls slowly like a punched score. Known genes glow (green sense / amber antisense). Click on a candidate gap (unannotated ORF, adjacent phage fragment) to flag it locally. Yjs CRDT local storage (D5.1 shipped). Live Defense Finder import to come.
c.
Two sequence ribbons that BLAST aligned poorly. Hover a position, insert or remove a gap. Real-time identity score, match columns in defense green, mismatches in rust. V1 = 2 pre-baked pairs (RdrB↔ADAR1, Cap4↔RNase H1). Live BLAST import + BLOSUM62 matrix to come.
a.
Three V1 targets (Cap4 CBASS, PycTIR Pycsar, RdrB RADAR). Mol* viewer in read-only mode; you declare which residues form a druggable pocket and the basic stats (size, mean hydrophobicity, net charge, AA distribution) update in real time. Interactive Mol* brush + FPocket WASM + cavity volume to come.
f.
Three bacterial-human pairs characterized 2020–2024 (RdrB↔ADAR1, Cap4↔RNase H1, Viperin↔RSAD2). Side-by-side Mol* viewers, pre-computed RMSD cited from literature, transferability hypothesis explicit. Triplet verdict (accept/reject/uncertain) + free note signed with DID.
d.
Plug in your own Claude, Gemini, or local Ollama key. Four pre-written prompts (3 CBASS inhibition mechanisms, falsifiability test, human ortholog query, paper summary). The browser calls the engine directly — Bactaegion never sees the key or response. Convert response → CC0 MDX draft signed by DID (D3.6 shipped). Streaming + graphical mind-map to come.
e.
On each lead page, a peer-review panel with 4 gauges (reproducibility, parsimony, biophysical rigor, in silico feasibility), free comment, three-state verdict (approve/reserve/caution). localStorage + Yjs CRDT (D5.2 shipped). WebRTC provider for multi-peer sync to come (D5.3).
h.
On each library family page, an overlay lets you add reading notes, flag a factual inaccuracy, or suggest enrichment. The work of the "gnomes" structurally recognized. B0 workflow: export your contributions via /en/my-contributions/ (DID-signed) then open a GitHub PR. Inline editable overlay to come.
On gamification
Bactaegion does not distract you. No ranking, no XP, no streak. No lootbox, no guilt-tripping notifications. Science doesn't need to be disguised as a casino to become engaging.
What we aim for is Raph Koster's satisfaction: the recognition of a pattern. When your eye catches a repetition the algorithm dismissed as noise, your brain releases its own dopamine — no badge needed. Our job is to design gestures that bring this recognition fast, often, and on real scientific problems.
Attribution flows through Open Badges 3.0 soulbound (W3C VC), non-transferable, ORCID-bridgeable. An attestation attests — it does not rank. A Schlafen Annotator badge is a description, not a rank. The "gnome" work of fixing broken links counts as much as the "hero" work of posting a new lead.