2-AIN-506, 2-AIN-252: Seminar in Bioinformatics (2), (4)
Summer 2025
Abstrakt

Roman Sarrazin-Gendron, Parham {Ghasemloo Gheidari}, Alexander Butyaev, Timothy Keding, Eddie Cai, Jiayue Zheng, Renata Mutalova, Julien Mounthanyvong, Yuxue Zhu, Elena Nazarova, Chrisostomos Drogaris, Kornel Erhart, Amelie Brouillette, Gabriel Richard, Randy Pitchford, Sebastien Caisse, Mathieu Blanchette, Daniel McDonald, Rob Knight, Attila Szantner, Jerome Waldispuhl. Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game. Nature biotechnology, 43(1):76-84. 2025.

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Download from publisher: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/pmid/38622344/ PubMed

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Bibliography entry: BibTeX

Abstract:

Citizen science video games are designed primarily for users already inclined to 
contribute to science, which severely limits their accessibility for an estimated 
community of 3 billion gamers worldwide. We created Borderlands Science (BLS), a 
citizen science activity that is seamlessly integrated within a popular 
commercial video game played by tens of millions of gamers. This integration is 
facilitated by a novel game-first design of citizen science games, in which the 
game design aspect has the highest priority, and a suitable task is then mapped 
to the game design. BLS crowdsources a multiple alignment task of 1 million 16S 
ribosomal RNA sequences obtained from human microbiome studies. Since its initial 
release on 7 April 2020, over 4 million players have solved more than 135 million 
science puzzles, a task unsolvable by a single individual. Leveraging these 
results, we show that our multiple sequence alignment simultaneously improves 
microbial phylogeny estimations and UniFrac effect sizes compared to 
state-of-the-art computational methods. This achievement demonstrates that 
hyper-gamified scientific tasks attract massive crowds of contributors and offers 
invaluable resources to the scientific community.