Yesterday I attended the annual "
Potatoes in Practice" meeting for the first time, mainly to see the finished display which I helped produce. Here it is, showing the twelve chromosomes of potato, drawn as stylized uniform green 'X' shapes, with different colour LEDs marking traits of interest for potato breeding.
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| Potato chromosomes 1 to 6, and 7 to 12, with LEDs marking traits of interest |
My contribution was the background images, which are actually drawn using the bases of the potato genome instead of pixels. For this I wrote a little
Python script to render photos using A, C, G and T from a FASTA sequence file, using
Biopython to load the sequences, the
Python Imaging Library (PIL) to load the photos,
NumPy to manipulate the array, and
ReportLab to render a PDF.
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| Potato chromosomes 9 and 10 | Close-up showing the A, C, G, T pixels |
