A few days ago I described in a NGS post an on-line game (Foldit) that allows users to contribute generate protein structure predictions. I was not aware of the existence of Phylo, a scientific video game in which "every puzzle completed contributes to mapping diseases within human DNA". This description, provided on the developers Facebook page, is at least vague.
The explanation given by a high school biology teacher in the Ars Technica open forum is much more clear: "Philo is flash game where you drag around DNA sequences to try to achieve a better alignment than the computer's algorithm for comparing genes between several species".
Philo was developed by Dr. Jérôme Waldispuhl of the McGill School of Computer Science and collaborator Mathieu Blanchette. Last month the researchers released the results computed from the Phylo solutions collected over the last year. The game has over 17,000 registered users and since it was launched in November 2010, the researchers have received more than 350,000 solutions to sequence alignment problems. "Phylo has contributed to improving our understanding of the regulation of 521 genes involved in a variety of diseases" says Jerome Waldispuhl in McGill's news release. "There's a lot of excitement in the idea of playing a game and contributing to science at the same time" says Phylo co-creator Mathieu Blanchette in the school release. "It's guilt-free playing; now you can tell yourself it's not just wasted time."
More info can be obtained from the Phylo web site.
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