EteRNA: Playing The Way to Scientific Success

January 24, 2012

Scientists from the Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Universities are relying on support from the crowd to get to the bottom of some of the mysteries of life. In the online game EteRNA players can participate in the scientific process.

RNA plays a key role in the transformation of genetic information into proteins in the biological cells of human and animal bodies. Therefore, it can be described as a flexible form of genetic information. Despite the fact that DNA is often the more prominent symbol, the significance of RNA within the scientific context is growing when it comes to the observation of genetic material.

EteRNA: „Played by Humans, Scored by Nature“

In order to design innovative RNA structures one first has to understand the most basic RNA structure principles and realize them with EteRNA. Find more details about the EteRNA game in the following video. The basic principle of the puzzle game is easy to understand: the aim is to correctly combine the four bases adenine, guanine, uracil and cytosine. If you are successful you will create the classical RNA chain form. In the next step it will fold into a three-dimensional ball. This is the fold that is currently still giving scientists a headache and why thousands of players are constantly working on revealing the mysteries of RNA. The best results are selected once a week and tested in the lab for stability.

Mandy Meyer-Steffan