A citizen science approach for sorting genomes

Abstract

The development of citizen science games requires the implementation of different game mechanics to make them challenging, interesting and motivating. These mechanics are often borrowed from commercial video games, but their outcome on the quality of solutions obtained and player motivation are not fully understood. Citizen science games can be used to solve complex scientific problems. Genome sorting is such a complex problem in genomics which is to find the shortest number of events for transforming one genome to another. Through solving this genome sorting problem we can also learn much about genome evolution. However, the presence of duplicate genes in the genomes makes this problem NP-hard. In this thesis, we propose a citizen science game GeSort which aims at solving the genome sorting problem even in the presence of duplicate genes. Through this game we also analyze the effect of showing a timer, an achievable (top) score and a live leaderboard on players’ scores, puzzle completion time and motivation using different versions of our citizen science game GeSort.