Seeking digital artist to help crowdfund Serratus - ababaian/serratus GitHub Wiki

Serratus is an all-volunteer project searching for new viruses

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we searched for new viruses by scanning huge databases of biological data for previously unrecognized species. We focused on RNA viruses because SARS-Cov-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, is an RNA virus, as are most viruses which infect humans and other mammals. We discovered more than 100,000 new RNA virus species, increasing the number known to science by a factor of ten as described in our paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.07.241729v2. We created a web site https://serratus.io enabling the scientific community to explore this trove of new discoveries and improve our understanding of virus biology and improve monitoring of emerging pathogens which may trigger future pandemics.

Crowdfunding project expenses

We have thousands of dollars in expenses which the volunteers are funding out of their own pockets because we have no grants or other formal funding. We're hoping to cover some of these expenses by crowdfunding, and we thought it would be fun and interesting to collaborate with an artist to generate original digital artworks which would be sold as non-fungible tokens.

How to contact us

If you're an artist and would like to get involved, send an email to [email protected].

Minting digital art for a new virus species

We identify new species using an "RNA barcode", a string of roughly 100 letters representing the sequence of amino acids in a signature protein found in almost all RNA viruses. There are 20 different amino acids, so most letters of the alphabet can appear in the string, with a few exceptions. Here is the barcode for SARS-Cov-2:

MGWDYPKCDRAMPNMLRIMASLVLARKHTTCCSLSHRFYRLANECAQVLSEMVMCGSSLYVKPGGTSSGDATTAYANSVFNICQAVTANVNALLSTDGNKIADKYVRNLQHRLYECLYRNRDVDTDFVNEFYAYLRKHFSMMILSDDAVV

Art could be generated from the letters themselves, or the string could be used as the seed to generate randomness when the image is minted. There is a great article in WIRED with background on the history of NFTs and how they work.

How would the artist-scientist collaboration work, exactly?

Everything is up for discussion. We're thinking that mints could be sold at fixed price or auctioned at a site such as https://opensea.io/, proceeds to be shared between the artist and Serratus.

NFT art samples

I found these on the web to illustrate the idea for those unfamiliar with NFTs. Images ("mints") are generated by an algorithm with a random element, so the output is different each time and comes as a surprise to everyone, including the artist. The "NFT" is stored in a cryptocurrency blockchain, establishing ownership of the image. The purchaser can choose to share the image or keep it for themselves.