EteRNA Offers Citizen Scientists a Remote Controlled Lab

From virtual atom smashers and coloring the connectome to fighting AIDS @home, citizen science and crowdsourcing are continually impacting the landscape of scientific resource and data acquisition – though many efforts find themselves limited to cyberspace. Fortunately, that’s changing: Researchers recently crowdsourced their experiment and successfully connected online gamers with an actual biochemistry lab.

The video game, called EteRNA, enables players to remotely carry out experiments that verify predictions of how ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules fold.  A study, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, bears the names of the more than 37,000 authors – only 10 of them professional scientists.

RNA plays key roles in the fundamental processes of life and disease, from protein synthesis and HIV replication to cellular control. The most basic rules for folding RNA are similar to the famous rules for the DNA double helix discovered by Watson and Crick. When RNA is synthesized, it doesn't just appear as a straight chain. It typically doubles back on itself to form helices that allow bases to pair. The EteRNA project is trying to gain mastery over this folding phenomenon.

Visit the EteRNA site to participate in active and proposed labs, or see upcoming and previous labs. -- i SGTW