PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jérôme Waldispühl
AU  - Arthur Kam
AU  - Paul P. Gardner
TI  - Crowdsourcing RNA structural alignments with an online computer game
AID  - 10.1101/009902
DP  - 2014 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 009902
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/10/03/009902.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/10/03/009902.full
AB  - The annotation and classification of ncRNAs is essential to decipher molecular mechanisms of gene regulation in normal and disease states. A database such as Rfam maintains alignments, consensus secondary structures, and corresponding annotations for RNA families. Its primary purpose is the automated, accurate annotation of non-coding RNAs in genomic sequences. However, the alignment of RNAs is computationally challenging, and the data stored in this database are often subject to improvements. Here, we design and evaluate Ribo, a human-computing game that aims to improve the accuracy of RNA alignments already stored in Rfam. We demonstrate the potential of our techniques and discuss the feasibility of large scale collaborative annotation and classification of RNA families.