Interactive Gameplay

Comparative genomics is a field of research that compares the genomes of different organisms to identify common patterns. It is a powerful method used to identify the genetic diseases that cause mutations. Next generation sequencing has revolutionized the field of genomics and molecular biology by producing more accurate, rapid and cost-effective genome analysis with the use of high-throughput sequencing technologies. This has intensified the need for accurate and performance efficient genome assemblers to assemble a large number of short reads produced by next generation sequencing technology.

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.

This research addresses a 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.

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