What I really liked about visiting ISMB last year was their diversity of talks and subgroup meetings in all areas related to biology and computers. Last year I joined two talks about improving bioinformatics education which were really interesting because I hadn’t thought about that before. This year I joined a special session on citizen science.

Citizen science is public participation in scientific research and can be done by almost everyone. I had heard about Foldit or Rosetta@Home but (unfortunately) never participated. Those two projects deal with protein folding (how does a protein reach its final functional 3D structure?) which is an important scientific problem but is computationally very expensive to study. While one of the projects is a screensaver which uses free resources of personal computers, the other is a game where players can get highscores for folding protein fragments manually. Helping science in a playful way is cool by itself but the project that was presented in one of the talks brought this to the next level. A citizen science minigame was integrated into an action game for PCs and consoles.

Gabriel Richard, game designer of Borderlands 3, was speaking about the process of implementing the citizen science minigame Borderlands Science into the action game. The first key point of implementation was the integration into an action game by using the preparation phase in-between action phases. They installed an in-game console in the spaceship where the players’ preparation phase happens.

The second key point of implementation was the reward system for completing the minigames. Players could upgrade their equipment when playing the Borderlands Science in-game console. According to Gabriel Richard 15 million minigame puzzles have been solved by players until now, exceeding their prior expectations of one million.

But how did this help science you might ask? The game developers worked together with a research team from McGill University to implement an adapted (video game-friendly) version of their DNA alignment game Phylo. If you want to try that, have a go at: https://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/

The adapted version had to be a bit smaller and quicker to solve:

The team at McGill uses the players’ data to improve bacterial genome alignments and according to their blog, players are doing a pretty good job. In the plot below each row is an aligned bacterial genome sequence and blue marks the alignment content that has been identical to a computer’s alignment and orange where players have scored higher (players are by default not allowed to score below the computer). As you can see, players improved about 38% of the alignment content. Well done!