[O HAI I’d play this. -egg]

…EteRNA, an online game with more than 38,000 registered users. Featuring an array of clickable candy-colored pieces, EteRNA looks a little like the popular game Bejeweled. But instead of combining jewel shapes in Tetris-like levels, EteRNA players manipulate nucleotides, the fundamental building blocks of RNA, to coax molecules into shapes specified by the game. Those shapes, which typically look like haphazardly mowed crop circles or jumbled chain-link necklaces, represent how RNA appears in nature while it goes about its work as one of life’s most essential ingredients. No self-sustaining organism gets made without the involvement of RNA.

Tweaking molecular models in this fashion is surprisingly fun—and, it turns out, useful. EteRNA was developed by scientists at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities, who use the designs created by players to decipher how real RNA works. The game is a direct descendant of Foldit—another science crowdsourcing tool disguised as entertainment—which gets players to help figure out the folding structures of proteins. EteRNA, though, goes much further than its predecessor.

The game’s elite players compete for a unique and wondrous prize: the chance to have RNA designs of their own making brought to life. Every two weeks, four to 16 player-designed molecules are picked to be synthesized in an RNA lab at Stanford. “It’s pretty incredible to imagine that somewhere there’s a piece of RNA that I designed that never existed anywhere in nature before,” says Robert Rogoyski, a New York City patent attorney who has had 14 of his EteRNA designs selected for synthesis. “It could encode a protein that no one has ever seen, something that’s important in the discovery of the next blockbuster glaucoma or cancer drug. Or it could be the cause of the zombie apocalypse.”

via New Videogame Lets Amateur Researchers Mess With RNA – Wired Science.