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Friday 30 December 2011

Will it be possible to build a online game capable of predicting phenotype from genotype?

Maybe this day is not so far away. In the field of proteomics, the gaming community is already starting "playing" a relevant role in creating accurate protein structure models using the multiplayer online game Foldit.
This topic is reviewed in the recent Games with a scientific purpose article on Genome Biology:
"The scientific value of the Foldit system was first demonstrated by showing that game players could solve specific structure prediction problems. In the first major publication to discuss Foldit, Baker and colleagues (6) showed that game players could, in many cases, generate better structure predictions than the state-of-the-art Rosetta structure prediction program. Foldit then unleashed their army of folders on the task of solving the structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus retroviral protease, a problem that was previously intractable to both computational and experimental methods (7). After 3 weeks of game play, the best solutions were screened and, remarkably, a solution to this previously unsolved structure was identified and subsequently validated. This achievement established Foldit as a legitimate resource for the structural biology community"
Zoran Popović, one of the founders of the Foldit project, has a audacious ambition for their community of game players: "Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize".
Considering the enormous amount of data generated by NGS, and the importance of data curation, it won't be surprising to see a future for multiplayer online games in Personal Genomics.

1 comment:

Giuseppe Borsani said...

I just realized there is something Italian in the Foldit game... The creators of the sw decided to use an Italian domain name for the web site (fold.it) to make it easy to remember it.