GEN along with partner, Scintellix, and sponsor, Agilent, brought you the Microarray Challenge.
Peter C. Johnson, M.D., president and CEO of Scintellix, created this painting called 'MicroArray.' He has embedded a cipher based on the dots in the pastel.
Here are the clues we released during the challenge, which ran between November 14 and December 31:
Clue 1: The code is read from left to right, beginning with the upper leftmost corner.
Clue 2: Colors from similar spectral families are considered to be the same (example: pink is equal to red)
Clue 3: It is a triplet code
Clue 4: The only spectral families that code (alone or in combination) for actual letters are yellow, green and red.
Clue 5: The dots on the bottom line of MicroArray code for blanks.
Clue 6: The answer is a statement having six words and the following letters are not used: J, K, L, M, P, Q, R, U, V, X, Y, Z.
Clue 7: In the triplet code, three adjacent dots code for each letter, which should be placed at the site of the center dot. Words are created from abutting triplet-coded letters. The code for the letter 'e' is 'yellow green green' and the code for the letter 'n' is 'green red green'.

GEN and Scintellix have formed a partnership to explore the hidden meaning found in biological imagery. The MicroArray Contest is the first installment of the partnership.