Fraxinus: Crowd-gaming ash dieback disease

I received this email from Arran Frood at the BBSRC about their new Facebook game to help harness the the power of the crowd, in this case helping with difficult genome alignments in an attempt to discover new variants that might be important in susceptibility or resistance to the serious problem of  ash dieback disease caused by Chalara fraxinea:

I do hope you are well. I don’t know if you’ve seen the stories about the new crowdsourcing game to fight ash dieback disease? It’s on Facebook and called Fraxinus and (so our testers say) really good and uses real data! I made a 5min video about it too.

As you’re such a splendid fellow, I wondered if you fancied helping to spread the word via your blog, or twitter?

Here’s the BBSRC press release (which also links to the video)
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/fundamental-bioscience/2013/130813-pr-gamers-to-join-ash-dieback-fight-back.aspx

YouTube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxqXeijQO0M&feature=youtu.be

And you’re almost certainly aware of the OpenSource project overall
http://oadb.tsl.ac.uk/

Do feel free to add the video to your blog, or just  a few tweets would be great because you have such leverage with the science/crowdsourcing community.

So, the lesson here is to flatter me shamelessly if you want something published on the blog.

I had a quick conversation with Dan McClean where I was a bit skeptical about how much better people were than Smith-Waterman for these kind of alignments, but he pointed me in the direction of this paper demonstrating how citizen science has helped improve multiple sequence alignments. The game has been nicely produced, and seems quite slick, although I'm not sure it will take over from Candy Crush as my other halves favourite game. Why not have a go yourself?