Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Gamers Outdo Computers at Matching Up Disease Genes: Scientific American

Sign of the times

The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics.

The game was created to address the 'multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem', which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species. A DNA sequence that is conserved across species suggests that it plays an important role in the ultimate function of that particular gene.

Gamers Outdo Computers at Matching Up Disease Genes: Scientific American

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