If you ever wanted to feel productive while playing video games all day during this pandemic, we have the perfect solution for you! The video game Borderlands 3 now includes a special mini-game that allows you to contribute to the research scientists are doing on the human gut, which will benefit real world people. Don’t believe us? About 57% of the cells in the human body belong to foreign microbes. These foreign microbes have a substantial impact on our body’s health and are made of DNA, similar to us. The goal of the research is to sequence all the microbes that are in our body so that we can learn much more about ourselves.
To support this effort, the Microsetta Initiative collected large amount of feces samples, extracted the microbes inside, and sequenced it’s DNA. However, it has been struggle to organize some of this DNA data as some species of microbes have similar, but not quite identical DNA. This similarities can cause errors in computer analysis due to their erroneous mapping. The game, on the other hand, is quite simple. You will be given different strands of DNA, each in the appearance of individual tiles. Your role is to place as many of these tiles in their appropriate row, while matching the colors. By playing the game and matching the tiles, you will help identify the potential errors in the scientists’s computer analysis, caused by the erroneous DNA mapping. This will help the scientists build a better algorithm that can benefit the entire science community!
