It's challenging cos normally with other games it's just for fun but this is actually like
a mind puzzle where you have to try and get your head round it.
I think it's really good and fun.
It's quite additive.
So the children are playing our Facebook game called Fraxinus that allows them to analyse
our ash dieback data.
The ash dieback data is DNA sequence data from lots of individual samples of ash dieback
taken from around Norfolk.
One of the problems that we have, particularly with a new problem, a new disease of trees
like ash dieback is that it takes a long time to try and pull together all the scientists
to do the analysis that we need.
We don't have a quick enough response.
What people can do for us, the general public, is lots and lots of small analysis.
In this case, we are using crowd sourcing with the general public through Facebook games
to try and do genetic analysis for us.
In playing the game you are doing a small, but very very useful genetic analysis.
And they are playing with the same sort of data I would use as a scientist that I would
do my analysis with.
I think it is really kind of changeling because you have to like line up all the patterns
and it's just like really hard to try and get your head around it because there are
so many different versions you can do.
It's just really good.
Yeah it is good based on a real problem whereas most games it is sort of pointless and based
on nothing.
At least doing this it is towards something.
So the game presents to us genomic DNA from different samples.
So, ok this section here this is a reference pattern.
This represents a little bit of DNA from one of our samples.
Each of the little leaf shapes represents a different nucleotide and the objective is
to try and find the best match possible between the reeds and the reference.
And the game allows us to move the reeds about left and right to try and accomplish the alignment.
And we can get the best alignment by introducing gaps by dragging the reeds about or by introducing
the legions from the reeds so we can remove individual leaves.
Yeah cos I mean just like doing the simple thing, just having a bit of enjoyment, can
actually like save the entire population of the ash and everything.
Yeah I think it is a good idea to do more of these.
Yeah, there should definitely be more games like this because there are not really many
out there that I can think of.
This is the only one I can think of and I think people should take more interest in
it.
And when we have done this over the whole set of reeds and maximise the score here,
it's the positions that differ from the reference pattern that we are interested in.
This set of differences represents a possible genetic variation between the sample and the
reference organisms.
I like the fact that it is quite easy to play.
It's quite competitive if you are playing against your friends if you want to get a
better score than them and if they beat you, you just want to beat them back.
Yeah and you can also challenge them, you can steal their different codes and patterns.
And it's just like, as Ed beat me at one of the patterns so I am trying to beat him.
How are you getting on?
Badly.
The game never gives you an exact answer it instead allows you to try and get your best
score.
Once you have a best score the other players can see your score and if they believe they
can do better then they are able to attempt to steal and it's this element of competition
that allows for an improvement and betterment of the alignments and the data in our databases.
Once we get it back to our databases it is used by scientists to try and infer such things
as genetic distance, or possible variations that it might cause extra lethality of the
disease, or extra susceptibility or resistance of a tree.