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An Interactive Gameplay to Crowdsource Multiple Sequence Alignment of Genome Sequences: Genenigma

Published: 07 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Stepping on the scale? Only in the morning, of course! - Exploring the Lived Experience of Consumer Self-Tracking Technology in the Context of Citizen ScienceProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685372(1-17)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2023)A Close Look at Citizen Science Through the HCI Lens: A Systematic Literature ReviewHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 202310.1007/978-3-031-42283-6_23(414-435)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2023
  • (2019)Rule-Based Recommendation System for Phylogenetic Inference2019 Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon)10.1109/MERCon.2019.8818878(704-709)Online publication date: Jul-2019

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICBBB '19: Proceedings of the 2019 9th International Conference on Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics
January 2019
115 pages
ISBN:9781450366540
DOI:10.1145/3314367
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Natl University of Singapore: National University of Singapore

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Published: 07 January 2019

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Author Tags

  1. Citizen science
  2. Comparative genomics
  3. Crowdsourcing
  4. Gamification
  5. Genenigma application
  6. Multiple sequence alignment

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Stepping on the scale? Only in the morning, of course! - Exploring the Lived Experience of Consumer Self-Tracking Technology in the Context of Citizen ScienceProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685372(1-17)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2023)A Close Look at Citizen Science Through the HCI Lens: A Systematic Literature ReviewHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 202310.1007/978-3-031-42283-6_23(414-435)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2023
  • (2019)Rule-Based Recommendation System for Phylogenetic Inference2019 Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon)10.1109/MERCon.2019.8818878(704-709)Online publication date: Jul-2019

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