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Monday, January 23, 2012 Computer Games for CrowdsourcingScientific Research Do you like computer games?If yes, here you have two options to play and at the same timecontribute to genetic and biotechnology research: phylo It looks like a game, but it is a tool to improve multiple sequencealignments of DNA regions that may be linked to various geneticdisorders. Sequence alignment is a way of identifying regions of similarity that may be consequence of functional, structural orevolutionary relationship between the sequences. This alignment isusually done with the aid of computer algorithms, however they do notguarantee a global optimization as it will take a prohibitively expensivecomputational power to achieve it.

Results: Participatory health is a growing area with individuals using health social networks, crowdsourced studies, smartphone health applications, and personal health records to achieve positive outcomes for a variety of health conditions. PatientsLikeMe and 23andMe are the leading operators of researcher-organized, crowdsourced health research studies. These operators have published findings in the areas of disease research, drug response, user experience in crowdsourced studies, and genetic association. Quantified Self, Genomera, and DIYgenomics are communities of participant-organized health research studies where individuals conduct self-experimentation and group studies. Crowdsourced health research studies have a diversity of intended outcomes and levels of scientific rigor.s

Milkyway@Home uses the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources, creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science. In computer science, the project is investigating different optimization methods which are resilient to the fault-prone, heterogeneous and asynchronous nature of Internet computing; such as evolutionary and genetic algorithms, as well as asynchronous newton methods. While in astroinformatics, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

In an effort to secure mass-collaboration, the company has launched a $7 million competition to reward talented minds for their potential contribution in perfecting the Personal Genome Machine sequencer that the company has developed. The machine relies on semi-conductor technology and has the capability of transforming chemical data into digital information. It is the first of its kind in the world and creative minds can enter the Grand Challenges Contest.

MyDaughtersDNA.org This site is dedicated to expanding our understanding of genetics conditions and variations in the human genome. The primary purpose of the site is to provide a forum for those searching for explanations and the help of the interested community of geneticists, patients, physicians, scientists and family members.

For the average biologist, hands-on literature mining currently means a keyword search in PubMed. However, methods for extracting biomedical facts from the scientific literature have improved considerably, and the associated tools will probably soon be used in many laboratories to automatically annotate and analyse the growing number of system-wide experimental data sets. Owing to the increasing body of text and the open-access policies of many journals, literature mining is also becoming useful for both hypothesis generation and biological discovery. However, the latter will require the integration of literature and high-throughput data, which should encourage close collaborations between biologists and computational linguists.

The world's largest set of data on human genetic variation - produced by the international 1000 Genomes Project - is now publicly available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, the National Institutes of Health and AWS jointly announced today. The public-private collaboration demonstrates the kind of solutions that may emerge from the Big Data Research and Development Initiative announced today by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) during an event at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

What is GenBank? GenBank ® is the NIH genetic sequence database, an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences ( Nucleic Acids Research , 2011 Jan;39(Database issue):D32-7 ). There are approximately 126,551,501,141 bases in 135,440,924 sequence records in the traditional GenBank divisions and 191,401,393,188 bases in 62,715,288 sequence records in the WGS division as of April 2011.

EteRNA is an online game which resembles Tetris or Dr. Mario was developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University researchers to uncover principles for designing molecules of RNA, which biologists believe may be the key regulator for all cellular activity.