Minigame integrated into EVE Online helps scientists understand cells

Enlarge / Yes, those are real human cells inside a fictional galaxy.

Citizen science, which asks the public to help out science projects, has produced some spectacular successes. But finding a way to grab and maintain hold of the public’s attention can be a challenge. That has led to a number of projects that turn the science challenge into a game, finding ways of making a “win” into scientific progress.

But scientists have also figured out ways of hijacking existing games, including using pre-existing fan bases that recruit players through in-game rewards. Now, there’s a progress report on an effort to turn EVE Online players into cell biology experts. Thanks to some in-game rewards, more than 300,000 players contributed roughly 33 million calls on where in a cell a protein was located. This not only greatly expanded a public database of information on proteins, but it enabled the researchers to better train a neural network to do the same thing.

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While in many cases it has been possible to determine or infer what a protein does, that only gives us a partial idea of its actual function. That’s because many proteins are shipped to specific locations in cells. So while two proteins may look similar in terms of the order and identity of their amino acids, one may be shipped to the nucleus, where it interacts with DNA, while its relative gets sent to the cell’s surface, where it acts on proteins in the surroundings. So figuring out where a protein normally resides within cells can go a long way toward helping us figure out its normal functions.