Are you one of those geniuses of Tetris? Do you love building things in Minecraft? Why not use those skills to help in the advancement of science? It is not necessary to know physics, mathematics or biology to play, in fact you will learn more by playing.

All this is possible nowadays thanks to the internet, videogames have gone from being a mere entertainment of a few to mass in society, and scientists from the Center for Bioinformatics at McGill University and Carnegie Mellon University (USA). ) have found a way to solve great scientific enigmas using the creative minds of millions of players around the world. I present you two new online games Phylo and Nanocrafter.

Phylo

It was developed by the Center for Bioinformatics at McGill University, the mechanics is to align four blocks of colors to match each other, very tetris-like, leaving as little space as possible or bad matings or you will be penalized by subtracting points. The sequence of color blocks that appears in each row corresponds to a DNA sequence of a gene. In this way, without realizing it, you will be contributing to identify mutations that may be responsible for different human diseases.

Do you want to try? Click here.

Nanocrafter

This game is designed to exploit human creativity and generate new research ideas in the field of synthetic biology and nanotechnology. That is, use various biological components - DNA, RNA and proteins - as building materials to develop devices or processes that do not exist in nature.

As a kind of biological minecraft it will be treated and in a fun way. Nanocrafter players will learn to manipulate DNA reactions. For this, the graphical interface shows pieces of colorful puzzles that imitate the biochemical principles of molecules. only some pieces will be paired with others or they will form simple and double chains, in a precise hierarchy of reactions (some will be given more easily than others), which you will know and dominate throughout the game. With them you can create logical circuits and mechanized structures.

Do you want to try? Click here.

Thank you for reading.

Part 1.

Sources and references:

• En.wikipedia.org. (2018). Phylo (video game). [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylo_(video_game) [Accessed 18 Oct. 2018].

• Graybeal, C. (2018). Nanocrafter: Playing a Game of Synthetic Biology - Citizen Science Salon. [online] Citizen Science Salon. Available at: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/citizen-science-salon/2015/02/22/nanocrafter-playing-game-synthetic-biology/#.W8jK0ddKhkg [Accessed 18 Oct. 2018].

• Phylo.cs.mcgill.ca. (2018). Phylo DNA Puzzle. [online] Available at: https://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/ [Accessed 18 Oct. 2018].

• Nanocrafter.org. (2018). Nanocrafter. [online] Available at: http://nanocrafter.org/landing [Accessed 18 Oct. 2018].

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