Portrait of Jiayue Zheng is unavailable

Jiayue Zheng

Alumni

Publications

Improving microbial phylogeny with citizen science within a mass-market video game
Roman Sarrazin-Gendron
Parham Ghasemloo Gheidari
Alexander Butyaev
Timothy Keding
Eddie Cai
Jiayue Zheng
Renata Mutalova
Julien Mounthanyvong
Yuxue Zhu
Elena Nazarova
Chrisostomos Drogaris
Kornél Erhart
David Michael Joshua Mathieu Vincent Steven Dan Jonathan Bélanger Bouffard Davidson Falaise Fiset Hebert He
David Michael Joshua Mathieu Vincent Steven Dan Jonathan Seung Jonathan David Steve Ludger Bélanger
David Bélanger
Michael Bouffard
Joshua Davidson
Mathieu Falaise
Vincent Fiset
Steven Hebert … (see 16 more)
Dan Hewitt
Jonathan Huot
Seung Kim
Jonathan Moreau-Genest
David Najjab
Steve Prince
Ludger Saintélien
Amélie Brouillette
Gabriel Richard
Randy Pitchford
Sébastien Caisse
Mathieu Blanchette
Daniel McDonald
Rob Knight
Attila Szantner
Jérôme Waldispühl
Citizen science video games are designed primarily for users already inclined to contribute to science, which severely limits their accessib… (see more)ility for an estimated community of 3 billion gamers worldwide. We created Borderlands Science (BLS), a citizen science activity that is seamlessly integrated within a popular commercial video game played by tens of millions of gamers. This integration is facilitated by a novel game-first design of citizen science games, in which the game design aspect has the highest priority, and a suitable task is then mapped to the game design. BLS crowdsources a multiple alignment task of 1 million 16S ribosomal RNA sequences obtained from human microbiome studies. Since its initial release on 7 April 2020, over 4 million players have solved more than 135 million science puzzles, a task unsolvable by a single individual. Leveraging these results, we show that our multiple sequence alignment simultaneously improves microbial phylogeny estimations and UniFrac effect sizes compared to state-of-the-art computational methods. This achievement demonstrates that hyper-gamified scientific tasks attract massive crowds of contributors and offers invaluable resources to the scientific community.
2024-04-14
Nature Biotechnology (published)
doi.org