Tag Archives: Alex Kawrykow

Phylo and crowdsourcing science by Canadian researchers

Alex Kawrykow and Gary Roumanis from McGill University (Montréal, Québec) have launched Phylo, a genetics game that anyone can play but is actually genetic research. From the article by Neal Ungerleider at the Fast Company website,

The new project, Phylo, was launched by a team at Montreal’s McGill University on November 29. Players are allowed to recognize and sort human genetic code that’s displayed in a Tetris-like format. Phylo, which runs in Flash, allows users to parse random genetic codes or to tackle DNA patterns related to real diseases. In a random game, a user found himself assigned to DNA portions linked to exudative vitreoretinopathy 4 and vesicoureteral reflux 2.

Players choose from a variety of categories such as digestive system diseases, heart diseases, brain diseases and cancer. All the DNA portions in the game are linked to different diseases. Once completed, they are analyzed and stored in a database; McGill intends to use players’ results in the game to optimize future genetic research.

This reminds me of Foldit (mentioned in my Aug. 6, 2010 posting) another multiplayer online biology-type game; that time the focus was protein folding. As Ungerleider notes in his article, gaming is being used in education, advertising, and media. I’ll add this,  it’s also being used for military training.

I was interested to note that the McGill game was made possible by these agencies,

* Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
* McGill School of Computer Science
* McGill Centre for Bioinformatics
* McGill Computational Structural Biology Group

On a side note, there’s another biology-type game called Phylo, it’s a trading card game designed by David Ng, a professor at the University of British Columbia. From the Phylo, trade card game About page,

What is this phylo thing? (Some interesting but relatively specific FAQs here)

Well, it’s an online initiative aimed at creating a Pokemon card type resource but with real creatures on display in full “artistic” wonder. Not only that – but we plan to have the scientific community weigh in to determine the content on such cards, as well as folks who love gaming to try and design interesting ways to use the cards. Then to top it all off, members of the teacher community will participate to see whether these cards have educational merit. Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

The Phylo, trading card game is in Beta (for those not familiar with the term beta, it means the game is still being tested, so there may be ‘bugs’).

It’s nice to be able to report on some innovative Canadian crowdsourcing science.