This coming Saturday 13^th April is Citizen Science Day, an ‘annual event to celebrate and promote all things citizen science’. Here at the Zooniverse, one of our team members will be posting each day this week to share with you their favourite Zooniverse projects. Today, we hear from our Biomedical Research Lead, Dr Helen Spiers:

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’d find it hard to pick a favorite Zooniverse project. Since the first Zooniverse project, Galaxy Zoo, was launched way back in 2007, we’ve launched over 150 different projects, so there are an awful lot of fantastic projects to get involved with, from helping to identify manatee calls to transcribing fragments of documents from the middle ages. So rather than trying to pick a single stand-out favorite, as Biomedical Research Lead, I thought I’d highlight a couple of the projects from this domain.

If you’ve ever wondered what a virus looks like we have the project for you! In Science Scribbler: Virus Factory you can join a growing community of volunteers who are helping advance science by identifying virus particles in images of the inside of a cell that has been infected with a virus. The aim of this project, which was launched earlier this year, is to help improve understanding of how viruses hijack their host cell’s internal machinery to create ‘factories’ where they replicate. Not only will this help improve understanding of how we can disrupt this process and better cure viral infections, the efforts of our volunteers in this project will also help researchers improve automated data analysis techniques so we can do more science faster! You can read more about this project here or get started and contribute some classifications here.

Images of a virus from Science Scribbler: Virus Factory

Continuing at the subcellular scale, in Zooniverse project Etch A Cell you can colour in for science! In the first edition of this project, a community of 5,546 volunteers have helped researchers based at the Francis Crick Institute in London study subcellular structures by drawing around the cell nucleus (a task known as ‘segmentation’) and their efforts have already produced some fantastic results which you can read more about here. If you’re in London soon, you can visit The Crick and see Etch A Cell featured in a free exhibition, ‘Craft & Graft: Making Science Happen’, running until 30th November 2019. Read more about the project here or start drawing for science here. 

A segmented cell nucleus from the Etch A Cell project

Both of these projects, Etch A Cell and Science Scribbler: Virus Factory, can be found on our Project Page along with all other current Zooniverse projects. We typically launch a new citizen science project each week, so chances are you’ll see a different project each time you visit – if you have a spare five minutes this Citizen Science Day why not take a look, and spend a few of your clicks on citizen science; you never know what you may discover!