ArticlePloS one2012
Phylo: a citizen science approach for improving multiple sequence alignment.
Article in PloS one, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 233 citations in OpenAlex.
- Crowdsourcing in Surgical Skills Acquisition: A Developing Technology in Surgical Education.Journal of graduate medical education · 2017Pooled it
- Crowdsourcing--harnessing the masses to advance health and medicine, a systematic review.Journal of general internal medicine · 2014Pooled it
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- Drugit: crowd-sourcing molecular design of non-peptidic VHL binders.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Defining quantum games.EPJ quantum technology · 2025Article
- Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game.Nature biotechnology · 2025Article
- Crowdsourced human-based computational approach for tagging peripheral blood smear sample images from Sickle Cell Disease patients using non-expert users.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Human-supervised clustering of multidimensional data using crowdsourcing.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Individual and collective human intelligence in drug design: evaluating the search strategy.Journal of cheminformatics · 2021Article
- DNA sonification for public engagement in bioinformatics.BMC research notes · 2021Article
- Phenotate: crowdsourcing phenotype annotations as exercises in undergraduate classes.Genetics in medicine : official journal of the American College of Medical Genetics · 2020Article
- Research data management in health and biomedical citizen science: practices and prospects.JAMIA open · 2020Article
- Building de novo cryo-electron microscopy structures collaboratively with citizen scientists.PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Designing Videogames to Crowdsource Accelerometer Data Annotation for Activity Recognition Research.Proceedings of the ... Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play · 2019Article
- Expertise and Engagement: Re-Designing Citizen Science Games With Players' Minds in Mind.FDG : proceedings of the International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games · 2019Article
- Scientific Discovery Games for Biomedical Research.Annual review of biomedical data science · 2019Article
- Producing knowledge by admitting ignorance: Enhancing data quality through an "I don't know" option in citizen science.PloS one · 2019Article
- The CrowdWater game: A playful way to improve the accuracy of crowdsourced water level class data.PloS one · 2019Article
- Repurposing Citizen Science Games as Software Tools for Professional Scientists.FDG : proceedings of the International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundComparative 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, aligning multiple sequences of DNA, an essential intermediate step for most types of analyses, is a difficult computational task. In parallel, citizen science, an approach that takes advantage of the fact that the human brain is exquisitely tuned to solving specific types of problems, is becoming increasingly popular. There, instances of hard computational problems are dispatched to a crowd of non-expert human game players and solutions are sent back to a central server. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL
findingsWe introduce Phylo, a human-based computing framework applying "crowd sourcing" techniques to solve the Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) problem. The key idea of Phylo is to convert the MSA problem into a casual game that can be played by ordinary web users with a minimal prior knowledge of the biological context. We applied this strategy to improve the alignment of the promoters of disease-related genes from up to 44 vertebrate species. Since the launch in November 2010, we received more than 350,000 solutions submitted from more than 12,000 registered users. Our results show that solutions submitted contributed to improving the accuracy of up to 70% of the alignment blocks considered. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We demonstrate that, combined with classical algorithms, crowd computing techniques can be successfully used to help improving the accuracy of MSA. More importantly, we show that an NP-hard computational problem can be embedded in casual game that can be easily played by people without significant scientific training. This suggests that citizen science approaches can be used to exploit the billions of "human-brain peta-flops" of computation that are spent every day playing games. Phylo is available at: http://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.