Apologies if this has already been posted before. I couldn’t find any previous posts.
A player in the discord confused about what mutating the cell in the cell editor actually does for the genome of the cell got me thinking: wouldn’t it be cool to have an interactive map of the genome for the cell? Where all the loci for the different genes for the various protein-complexes and organelle-proteins could be highlightable and you could learn more about the genome’s organization by hovering over the different loci? It would really underline exactly what changing your cell in the cell editor is doing. There could be small descriptions of different types of mutations and how they work in real life. It would also teach players about the differences between eukaryotic and prokaryotic genomes (circular DNA vs linear). A small version of the map could be at the top of the cell editor screen with the genes for whatever part you’re adding appearing in the genome as colored sections:
Introducing plasmids could also offer an interesting anti-viral immune-system for microbes if this was ever in store for the future of the game (restriction enzymes & CRISPR-CAS9 which are extremely important irl tools for GMO).
This would be for much further down the line obviously after the microbe stage is nearing completion and would be more for extra learning.
I suppose this would be a pretty cool looking feature to add. There’d need to be a very enthusiastic programmer about this feature to get this implemented though as I estimate this to take quite a ton of programming work to do.
Plasmids has been suggested before.
Untrustedlife casually asked in 2019:
Do we still want plasmids?
Another thread where plasmids were mentioned:
The microbe roadmap is finished (see: Finishing the microbe stage roadmap). I’ll only allow adding things to it if it is required to polish an already planned / implemented feature or it is deemed an extremely important addition. I don’t see this feature matching either of those criteria, which is why I said that there’d need to be a very enthusiastic programmer who would champion this feature through the development process.
