Video games designed to tackle tough scientific problems are leading to breakthroughs in RNA structure, protein folding, genetic sequence alignment, and more. Eli Fisker has struggled to hold down a job as a librarian, largely as a result of an undiagnosed condition he describes as similar to Asperger’s. In his ample spare time, the 35-year-old from Alborg, Denmark, plays an online video game in which he arranges colored discs into two-dimensional chain-link shapes. It’s addictive, and he plays for hours on end. But EteRNA is not your typical Internet time suck: the discs represent nucleotides, and the patterns they form are blueprints for RNA molecules. Every 2 weeks, the best designs—voted for by the players themselves—are synthesized in the lab by the Stanford University scientists who helped to create the game, and observations about how the resulting molecules behave are relayed to the players. That feedback informs the development of new playing strategies, which in turn help the scientists to better understand the rules of RNA folding and function.
Although there’s no Ph.D. when his name, Fisker, one of the best of the game’s 40,000 registered players, is helping to unravel a fundamental aspect of biochemistry that has
long eluded the world’s brightest scientists—and even serving to to style novel RNAs that write proteins to mend carbon or fight sickness.
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