Phylo
Phylo is an experimental citizen science game about multiple sequence alignment optimisation. Players solve pattern-matching puzzles that represent nucleotide sequences of different phylogenetic taxa to optimize alignments over a computer algorithm. Players attempt to create the highest point value score for each set of sequences by matching as many colours as possible and minimizing gaps. Phylo was developed by the McGill Centre for Bioinformatics.
Articles
Wired, on citizen science games
Sea Hero Quest game aims to diagnose dementia by testing navigation skills By AMELIA HEATHMAN, 17 November 2016 2.4 million people have downloaded the app created by neuroscientists to help them understand dementia. Hilary Evans, […]
Five articles about citizen science games on Discover Magazine
1. The Computer Game That Could Cure HIV, May 12, 2008 2. Guilt-Free Procrastination: This Online Game Could Cure Genetic Diseases, November 30, 2010 3. Nanocrafter: Playing a Game of Synthetic Biology, February 22, 2015 […]
Open-Phylo: give science back to the people
It seems that scientific research in the last two hundred years or so has made a full conceptual circle. In the good old days of the nineteenth century, any Englishman with a vaguely middle-class background, […]
Skip FarmVille: play Phylo instead
Skip FarmVille: play Phylo instead Phylo is a nifty Flash-based game designed to help researchers figure out multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). MSAs are ways of aligning DNA or RNA to discover areas that are similar. […]
Earn a Nobel Prize in your Lunch-Break! The Best “Citizen Science” Games Reviewed!
This article was originally written by Stuart Farrimond for realdoctorstu.com https://realdoctorstu.com/2011/02/15/earn-a-nobel-prize-in-your-lunch-break-the-best-citizen-science-games-reviewed/ It sometimes feels like we are an endangered species. Computers just keep getting smarter; not only are they immeasurably better at doing maths and […]
Publications
Online citizen science games: opportunities for the biological sciences
Recent developments in digital technologies and the rise of the internet have created new opportunities for citizen science. One of these has been the development of online citizen science games where complex research problems have […]
Open-Phylo: a customizable crowd-computing platform for multiple sequence alignment
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 […]
Phylo: A Citizen Science Approach for Improving Multiple Sequence Alignment
Background Comparative genomics, or the study of the relationships of genome structure and function across different species, offers a powerful tool for studying evolution, annotating genomes, and understanding the causes of various genetic disorders. However, […]
Interviews
Easily Solved by Humans: An Interview with Phylo Co-Creator Jérôme Waldispühl
Several months ago I started playing an online game called Phylo. It is both simple and challenging, and I can feel virtuous as I play, since (according to its website) the gameplay is helping scientists […]