title: Crowdsourcing RNA structural alignments with an online computer game.
abstract: The annotation and classification of ncRNAs is essential to decipher molecular mechanisms of gene regulation in normal and disease states. A database such as Rfam maintains alignments, consensus secondary structures, and corresponding annotations for RNA families. Its primary purpose is the automated, accurate annotation of non-coding RNAs in genomic sequences. However, the alignment of RNAs is computationally challenging, and the data stored in this database are often subject to improvements. Here, we design and evaluate Ribo, a human-computing game that aims to improve the accuracy of RNA alignments already stored in Rfam. We demonstrate the potential of our techniques and discuss the feasibility of large scale collaborative annotation and classification of RNA families.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0E9, Canada. jeromew@cs.mcgill.ca.
authors.forename: Jérôme
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Waldispühl
authors.forename: Arthur
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kam
authors.forename: Paul P
authors.initials: PP
authors.lastname: Gardner
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D063045:Crowdsourcing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D030561:Databases, Nucleic Acid / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D009690:Nucleic Acid Conformation; D009862:Online Systems; D012313:RNA / Q000737:chemistry*; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D018910:Video Games / Q000706:statistics & numerical data
chemical_list: D012313:RNA