Players Needed to Solve Puzzles and Help Advance Cancer Research

upstart writes:

Players needed to solve puzzles and help advance cancer research:

The game, out today on iOS and Android and available in English, Spanish, Catalan and Italian, is the result of a two-and-a-half-year long citizen science project developed by a team of researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Centro Nacional de Analisis Genomico (CNAG-CRG) and game professionals.

The game was created to boost worldwide research efforts that depend on cancer cell lines, a critical resource used by scientists to study cancer and test new drugs to treat the disease. One of the limitations of cancer cell lines are a lack of high-resolution genome reference maps, which are necessary to help researchers interpret their scientific results, for example pinpointing the location of genes of therapeutic interest or potential mutation sites.

[...] To play GENIGMA, players have to solve a puzzle involving a string of blocks of different colours and shapes. Each string represents a genetic sequence in the cancer cell line, and how players organise the blocks is a potential solution to the location of genes.

Players have to reorganise the blocks so that they attain the highest-score possible. The higher the number of players and high scores, the higher likelihood that researchers have found the correct sequence for this particular location in the reference map.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.