Genomic research is the name of the game
Computer scientists at McGill University have developed an online puzzle game, called Phylo, which also contributes to genetic research. The game has been played by 300,000 people over the past three years - now, its creators are making the players available to scientists around the globe.
Created by Professor Jérôme Waldispühl and his colleagues, Phylo is a cross between Tetris, Rubik’s cube and a sliding-tile puzzle game. As gamers line up coloured rectangles that represent real genetic material (in the form of DNA sequences), they are helping to pinpoint the genetic anomalies that may be the key to a range of diseases that include diabetes, breast cancer and retinoblastoma (the most common form of malignant tumour in the eyes of children).
The players have already suggested solutions for over 4000 puzzles based on genomic data that has already been gathered. Now these gamers have the chance to help scientists with a whole new range of research. The idea is to put human talent to work to improve on what is already being done by computers in the field of comparative genomics.
Writing in the journal Genome Biology, the McGill researchers describe the launch of Open-Phylo: “a freely accessible crowd-computing platform that enables any scientist to enter our system and use crowds of gamers to assist computer programs in solving one of the most fundamental problems in genomics: the multiple sequence alignment problem”.
As well as providing solutions to genomic problems, the scientists hope the process will help to promote a better general understanding of scientific research. Waldispühl said since the launch of the game he has had several conversations with people who want to know more about the research; he now hopes to create such conversations between scientists and gamers around the globe.
The game can be accessed online at http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/. It is available in 10 languages, including German, Russian, Chinese and Hebrew, and a future goal is to translate the website into Japanese, Arabic and Italian.
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