An Interactive Gameplay to Crowdsource Multiple Sequence Alignment of Genome Sequences: Genenigma
Conference paper
Comparative genomics is a field of research that compares genomes of different organisms to identify common patterns. It is a powerful method used to identify the genetic diseases that cause mutations. Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is an intermediate step in comparative genomics analysis that aligns three or more biological sequences of similar length. MSA is an NP-hard problem for which no efficient algorithm exists to perform this in a reasonable amount of time. However, humans across evolution have developed special intuition to identify visual patterns in short periods of time. Hence, a citizen science approach can be devised to solve the MSA problem by transforming it into a human computing game on creating visually similar patterns. In this paper, we introduce the mobile game "Genenigma", which harnesses the human computing capability to align multiple sequences of genomes and use the results to help geneticists to understand the genetic code. The usability and performance scores of "Genenigma" predicts a larger user base than existing mobile games built for this purpose.