加拿大麦吉尔大学Jérôme Waldispühl小组在大众电子游戏中利用公民科学改进微生物系统发育。该项研究成果于2024年4月15日在线发表在《自然—生物技术》杂志上。

研究人员创建了“边疆科学”（Borderlands Science，简称BLS），将公民科学活动无缝整合到一款广受欢迎的商业视频游戏中，该游戏的玩家数以千万计。这种整合得益于公民科学游戏的一种新颖的游戏优先设计，即游戏设计方面具有最高优先级，然后将合适的任务映射到游戏设计中。BLS众包了从人类微生物组研究中获得的，100万条16S核糖体RNA序列的多重比对任务。

自2020年4月7日首次发布以来，已有400多万玩家解决了超过1.35亿个科学谜题，这是一个人无法解决的任务。利用这些成果，研究人员表明，与最先进的计算方法相比，该多序列比对同时改进了微生物系统发生学估计和UniFrac效应大小。这一成果表明，高度游戏化的科学任务吸引了大量的贡献者，为科学界提供了宝贵的资源。

据介绍，公民科学视频游戏主要是为已经倾向于为科学做出贡献的用户设计的，这严重限制了其对全球约30亿游戏玩家社区的可及性。

附：英文原文

Title: Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game

Author: Sarrazin-Gendron, Roman, Ghasemloo Gheidari, Parham, Butyaev, Alexander, Keding, Timothy, Cai, Eddie, Zheng, Jiayue, Mutalova, Renata, Mounthanyvong, Julien, Zhu, Yuxue, Nazarova, Elena, Drogaris, Chrisostomos, Erhart, Kornl, Brouillette, Amlie, Richard, Gabriel, Pitchford, Randy, Caisse, Sbastien, Blanchette, Mathieu, McDonald, Daniel, Knight, Rob, Szantner, Attila, Waldisphl, Jrme

Issue&Volume: 2024-04-15

Abstract: Citizen science video games are designed primarily for users already inclined to contribute to science, which severely limits their accessibility for an estimated community of 3 billion gamers worldwide. We created Borderlands Science (BLS), a citizen science activity that is seamlessly integrated within a popular commercial video game played by tens of millions of gamers. This integration is facilitated by a novel game-first design of citizen science games, in which the game design aspect has the highest priority, and a suitable task is then mapped to the game design. BLS crowdsources a multiple alignment task of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences obtained from human microbiome studies. Since its initial release on 7 April 2020, over 4 million players have solved more than 135 million science puzzles, a task unsolvable by a single individual. Leveraging these results, we show that our multiple sequence alignment simultaneously improves microbial phylogeny estimations and UniFrac effect sizes compared to state-of-the-art computational methods. This achievement demonstrates that hyper-gamified scientific tasks attract massive crowds of contributors and offers invaluable resources to the scientific community.

DOI: 10.1038/s41587-024-02175-6

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02175-6