Abstract
Citizen science games such as Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, and Phylo aim to harness the intelligence and processing power generated by crowds of online gamers to solve scientific problems. However, the selection of the data to be analyzed through these games is under the exclusive control of the game designers, and so are the results produced by gamers. Here, we introduce 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.
Highlights
Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithms are among the most powerful tools available today to study the evolution and function of DNA, RNA and protein sequences [1]
We introduced Phylo [5,6], a casual online puzzle, which translates small-scale multiple sequence alignment problems into puzzles, whose solutions, produced by online gamers, are used to improve the accuracy of MSAs obtained with state-of-the-art alignment algorithms
Our results suggest that humans can provide insights that cannot be entirely replicated by heuristics-based algorithms
Summary
Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithms are among the most powerful tools available today to study the evolution and function of DNA, RNA and protein sequences [1]. Key to these analyses is the ability to align multiple sequences accurately, a computationally hard problem [2]. Phylo is a purely ludic game that can be played by untrained web users with almost no prior knowledge of the biological context. This unique feature enables it to reach a broad audience ranging from teenagers
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