Online Video Game Plugs Players Into Remote-Controlled Biochemistry Lab
Crowdsourcing is the latest research rage—Kickstarter to raise funding, screen savers that number-crunch, and games to find patterns in data—but most efforts have been confined to the virtual lab of the Internet. In a new twist, researchers have now crowdsourced their experiments by connecting players of a video game to an actual biochemistry lab. The game, called EteRNA, allows players to remotely carry out real experiments to verify their predictions of how RNA molecules fold. The first big result: a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, bearing the names of more than 37,000 authors—only 10 of them professional scientists.
![3.7万名玩家成为论文的共同作者 3.7万名玩家成为论文的共同作者](http://www.bio360.net/attachments/2014/02/1391663933bc4f7ecda6f0a8b4.jpg)
众包 可用于筹集资金,也可用于虚拟实验。通过将虚拟游戏玩家和真实的生化实验室连接在一起,研究人员众包了他们的实验。
这款名叫 EteRNA 的游戏可以让玩家远程执行真实的实验,去验证有关 RNA 分子折叠的理论预测。众包实验的第一个结果已经出来,发表在本周出版的期刊 PNAS 上,论文署名作者多达 3.7 万人,其中专业科研人员只有 1 0人。
有研究人员认为 EteRNA 代表未来的科学,不只是众包公民科学家,还允许他们远程访问真实实验室。云端生物化学正成为现实,科学家可以外包枯燥的实验,而将精力集中在不枯燥的部分。
原文检索:
John Bohannon. Online Video Game Plugs Players Into Remote-Controlled Biochemistry Lab. Science, 31 January 2014; DOI: 10.1126/science.343.6170.475
Jeehyung Lee, Wipapat Kladwang, Minjae Lee, Daniel Cantu, Martin Azizyan, Hanjoo Kim,Alex Limpaecher, Sungroh Yoon, Adrien Treuille, Rhiju Das, and EteRNA Participants. RNA design rules from a massive open laboratory. PNAS, January 27, 2014; doi:10.1073/pnas.1313039111