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Gamers Outdo Computers At DNA Sequence Alignments
ananyo writes "In another victory for crowdsourcing, gamers playing Phylo have beaten a state-of-the-art program at aligning regions of 521 disease-associated genes form different species. The 'multiple sequence alignment problem' refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species. DNA sequences that are conserved across species may play an important role in the ultimate function of that particular gene. But with thousands of genomes likely to be sequenced in the next few years, sequence alignment will only become more difficult in future. Researchers now report that players of Phylo have produced roughly 350,000 solutions to various multiple sequence alignment problems, beating the accuracy of alignments from a program in roughly 70% of the sequences they manipulated."
This is an interesting finding, but let's not get too carried away. If you read the article, you'll see that: a) The phylo-based alignments are partial solutions. They are simplified for the human user by leaving many orthologous sequences out of the alignment. This means there is another algorithm that finishes these partial solutions before they can be compared to solutions produced solely by algorithms. b) Only 36% of the _best_ phylo-based solutions, once completed, were better than the algorithms' solutions. This is still an improvement, but it DOES NOT suggest that humans are better than computers at multiple sequence alignment. If you were to ever try to solve a real MSA problem by hand, you would quickly understand how completely hopeless it is. In fact, even aligning 2 sequences of any appreciable length by hand is a chore. The problem here is the misguided title: "Gamers outdo computers at matching up disease genes" which should read: "Gamers + computer outdo computers only at matching up very small fragments of disease genes, some of the time"