Please share and embed this video with credit to BBSRC. See full press release here: http://bit.ly/14Gxc2u Let scientists keep the lab coat, goggles and pipette. Playing a Facebook game as simple as Candy Crush is enough to take part in active research to help save the ash tree. In December 2012, scientists from The Sainsbury Laboratory hired Sheffield-based gaming company Team Cooper to develop ‘Fraxinus’. The game uses real genetic data from the fungus which causes Chalara ash dieback and from the common ash, Fraxinus excelsior. It involves matching and rearranging patterns of coloured leaf shapes which represent nucleotides – the letters that make up a genome sequence. People are better at this than computers alone, because the human eye can recognise patterns that computers miss. The Facebook game is part of a rapid response to ask dieback funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), which includes understanding more about the disease, how it attacks ash trees, finding natural resistance and predicting and mitigating disease progression. Fraxinus game: http://apps.facebook.com/fraxinusgame/ OpenAshDieback site: http://oadb.tsl.ac.uk/ See more BBSRC videos here: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/videos/ See BBSRC News for the latest news, features and events: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news Follow BBSRC on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bbsrc
More Info: http://goo.gl/R6YEQg
Produced by: BBSRC
Year: 2013
Language: English
Region: UK, Global
