{"id":1428,"date":"2024-04-15T11:23:01","date_gmt":"2024-04-15T18:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/wordpress\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2025-08-04T15:04:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T22:04:23","slug":"millions-of-gamers-advance-biomedical-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/?p=1428","title":{"rendered":"Millions of gamers advance biomedical research"},"content":{"rendered":"

Largest global citizen science project accelerates knowledge of human microbiome<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Leveraging gamers and video game technology can dramatically boost scientific research according to a new study published today in\u00a0<\/a>Nature Biotechnology<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

4.5 million gamers around the world have advanced medical science by helping to reconstruct microbial evolutionary histories using a minigame included inside the critically and commercially successful video game,\u00a0Borderlands 3<\/i>. Their playing has led to a significantly refined estimate of the relationships of microbes in the human gut. The results of this collaboration will both substantially advance our knowledge of the microbiome and improve on the AI programs that will be used to carry out this work in future.<\/p>\n

Tracing the evolutionary relationships of bacteria<\/b><\/h4>\n

By playing\u00a0Borderlands Science<\/i><\/a>, a mini-game within the looter-shooter video game\u00a0Borderlands 3<\/i><\/a>, these players have helped trace the evolutionary relationships of\u00a0more than a million different kinds of bacteria\u00a0that live in the human gut, some of which play a crucial role in our health. This information represents an exponential increase in what we have discovered about the microbiome up till now. By aligning rows of tiles which represent the genetic building blocks of different microbes, humans have been able to take on tasks that even the best existing computer algorithms have been unable to solve yet.<\/p>\n

The project was led by McGill University researchers, developed in collaboration with\u00a0Gearbox Entertainment Company<\/a>, an award-winning interactive entertainment company, and Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS<\/a>), a Swiss IT company connecting scientists to video games), and supported by the expertise and genomic material from the\u00a0Microsetta Initiative<\/a>\u00a0led by Rob Knight from the Departments of Pediatrics, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering at the University of California San Diego.<\/p>\n

Humans improve on existing algorithms and lay groundwork for the future<\/b><\/h4>\n

Not only have the gamers improved on the results produced by the existing programs used to analyze DNA sequences, but they are also helping lay the groundwork for improved AI programs that can be used in future.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know whether the players of a popular game like\u00a0Borderlands 3<\/i>\u00a0would be interested or whether the results would be good enough to improve on what was already known about microbial evolution. But we\u2019ve been amazed by the results.\u201d says\u00a0J\u00e9r\u00f4me Waldisp\u00fchl<\/a>, an associate professor in McGill\u2019s School of Computer Science and senior author on the paper published today. \u201cIn half a day, the\u00a0Borderlands Science<\/i>\u00a0players collected five times more data about microbial DNA sequences than our earlier game,\u00a0Phylo<\/i><\/a>,<\/i>\u00a0had collected over a 10-year period.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea for integrating DNA analysis into a commercial video game with mass market appeal came from Attila Szantner, an adjunct professor in McGill\u2019s School of Computer Science and CEO and co-founder of\u00a0MMOS<\/a>.\u00a0\u201cAs almost half of the world population is playing with videogames, it is of utmost importance that we find new creative ways to extract value from all this time and brainpower that we spend gaming,\u201d says Szantner. \u201cBorderlands Science<\/i>\u00a0shows how far we can get by teaming up with the game industry and its communities to tackle the big challenges of our times.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGearbox\u2019s developers were eager to engage millions of Borderlands players globally with our creation of an appealing in-game experience to demonstrate how clever minds playing Borderlands are capable of producing tangible, useful, and valuable scientific data at a level not approachable with non-interactive technology and mediums,\u201d said\u00a0Randy Pitchford<\/a>, founder and CEO of Gearbox Entertainment Company. \u201cI’m proud that Borderlands Science has become one of the largest and most accomplished citizen science projects of all time, forecasting the opportunity for similar projects in future video games and pushing the boundaries of the positive effect that video games can make on the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Relating microbes to disease and lifestyle<\/b><\/h4>\n

The tens of trillions of microbes that colonize our bodies play a crucial role in maintaining human health. But microbial communities can change over time in response to factors such as diet, medications, and lifestyle habits.<\/p>\n

Because of the sheer number of microbes involved, scientists are still only in the early days of being able to identify which microorganisms are affected by, or can affect, which conditions.<\/p>\n

Which is why the researchers\u2019 project and the results from the gamers are so important.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expect to be able to use this information to relate specific kinds of microbes to what we eat, to how we age, and to the many diseases ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to Alzheimer\u2019s that we now know microbes to be involved in,\u201d adds Knight, who also directs the\u00a0Center for Microbiome Innovation<\/a>\u00a0at the UC San Diego. \u201cBecause evolution is a great guide to function, having a better tree relating our microbes to one another gives us a more precise view of what they are doing within and around us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Largest global citizen science project accelerates knowledge of human microbiome   Leveraging gamers and video game technology can dramatically boost scientific research according to a new study published today in\u00a0Nature<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1429,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1650,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions\/1650"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlab.ucsd.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}