RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Crowdsourcing RNA structural alignments with an online computer game
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 009902
DO 10.1101/009902
A1 Jérôme Waldispühl
A1 Arthur Kam
A1 Paul P. Gardner
YR 2014
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/10/03/009902.abstract
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.