Promote cancer research by playing with your mobile

No matter your education, your age or your skills.

You can help advance cancer research.

And what is even better, you can do it by playing with your mobile.

A team from the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG-CRG) in Barcelona has just launched GENIGMA, a

that not only provides the player with entertainment or fun.

Solving the puzzles that it proposes also serves to update the

.

Thanks to the herd intelligence, logic and skill of those who play the video game, its creators hope to have maps of the reference genome much more precise than the current ones, something essential for the interpretation of studies with cell lines.

“The lack of reference maps of the genome

.

It is like asking someone to navigate a current city with maps from the past”, points out Marc Martí-Renom, ICREA researcher and head of the Structural Genomics group at CNAG-CRG.

Currently, he continues, those who work, for example with the

they use a standard reference map, which is not true to reality.

It is necessary to draw a better map, placing in it all the alterations in the genomic sequences that are associated with cancer.

The researchers could have turned to artificial intelligence to achieve this goal, but they believe human-generated data may be a more useful tool.

, Martí-Renom underlines. “The algorithms follow rules that we impose on them, they move along the same paths, while the players do not follow any rules. Each one will do what they think they have to do with the puzzle, which is very interesting and we believe it can provide very valuable information", continues the researcher, who recalls that the data obtained in this way will be subsequently evaluated and compared with the that throw

projects .

The object of the game is to solve puzzles made up of chains of blocks with different shapes and colors.

Each strand represents a genetic sequence, and the way the building blocks - DNA fragments - are arranged is a potential solution to their spatial position in the genome.

The player must rearrange the blocks, whose color and score changes depending on their location.

"We have calculated that when at least 40 players provide the same solution with the highest score, that solution will be considered the best possible," says the researcher.

In order for the volume of data to be sufficient and to increase the probability of finding the correct sequences for each location, at least

And the goal of the creators is to reach this milestone before the end of April 2022. In total, 1,200,000 puzzle solutions are needed to achieve a detailed map of the breast cancer genome, the first of the cell lines that will be addressed by the video game, explain the creators.

The first puzzles proposed by the video game are those of chromosome 17, "the chromosome that has more genes associated with breast cancer, such as

or

", explains Martí-Renom.

On Mondays of each week, the team will introduce new snippets of the genome into the game, which will also provide players with insight into what they're doing means from a biology standpoint.

The researchers are confident that the logic and skills of this citizen research team they hope to form with people from around the world will mark a turning point.

The game is available for free on the

in Spanish, Catalan, English and Italian.

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