2013-08-09

Pixelated Posters at Potatoes in Practice

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.

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.

Potato chromosomes 9 and 10Close-up showing the A, C, G, T pixels