correspondence build confidence, have an open and honest transgender and queer or questioning) Michelle McMurry-Heath ✉ dialogue about the past, and work with local representation on biotech company boards, Biotechnology Innovation Organization, community leaders who can be that in C-suites and in functional leadership Washington, DC, USA. trusted voice. positions. ✉e-mail: [email protected] While the BIOEquality Agenda will BIO is deeply committed to address inequities in healthcare delivery, both BIOEquality and the Right Published online: 11 September 2020 STEM (science, technology, engineering Mix Matters campaign. In these https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0688-8 and math) programs and minority difficult and uncertain times, we will entrepreneurship, BIOEquality complements continue to build support for a more Competing interests M.M.-H. works for industry trade organization the the Right Mix Matters initiative we launched equitable future for the biotech sector and Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO). She was last year to accelerate gender, racial, the millions of patients across the world who employed by Johnson & Johnson and holds stock in ethnic and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, depend on our success. ❐ Johnson & Johnson. Leveling up citizen science To the Editor — Over the past decade, online science discovery games (SDGs) have become an increasingly popular practice for engaging the public in research activities. This methodology has had the most impact in molecular and cell biology, where participants are recruited for not only data collection and classification tasks, but also solving complex computational problems that require human supervision or insight. As the life sciences move toward increasingly large and ambitious projects, however, there is a need to complement existing models that try to attract users to yet another third-party website. Here we describe our experience with Borderlands, a massively multiplayer online game that embeds citizen-science problems into its virtual universe and engages a new user base, with implications for future citizen science initiatives seeking to meet the Fig. 1 | Arcade booth allowing the gamers to access Borderlands Science in Borderlands 3. growing demands of biology. Citizen science in biology Since 2008, the Foldit team has recruited like Foldit take advantage of large groups OpenVaccine or OpenCRISPR from the online participants to predict protein 3D of participants for identifying skilled users EteRNA project. structure via a 3D puzzle game distributed and promising solutions to a hard problem. Recruiting large groups of volunteers as a standalone program for personal In contrast, Phylo and related SDGs aim should also serve long-term objectives and computers1. This project helped refine to harness the wisdom of the crowd by not be confined to solving a specific problem a retroviral protease structure2 and later detecting collective behaviors of the gamers without a larger context. Projects like discovered novel protein folds3. Two years while solving small instances of the problem, ENCODE8 or the Earth Microbiome Project9 later, Phylo4 pushed the gamification and using this knowledge to build a involve hundreds of scientists worldwide and concept to reach a broader public by global solution. require assembly and coordination of many crowdsourcing comparative genomics tasks Having sustainable and large crowds of diverse areas of expertise. At all stages of the via tile-matching puzzle games. Other participants is necessary for opening this research pipeline and at various degrees of successful projects include web-based games technology as a service to the whole scientific involvement, collection, curation and analysis for RNA structural modeling (for example, community7. Popular SDGs represent the of the data need the supervision of human EteRNA5) and neuron segmentation best option for solving on-demand problems experts. But as the size and complexity of the (for example, EyeWire6). for many groups of independent scientists. project teams expand, so too does the cost of The efficiency and effectiveness of SDGs Although few such platforms have yet to human intervention and logistics, which may is necessarily determined by the number of be deployed, this approach constitutes a not be sustainable. To expand the boundaries contributors and volume of data collected, natural and promising evolution of SDGs of the system, we need to refactor the regardless of citizen-science strategy. Games that is exemplified by recent initiatives like organization of large scientific projects. 1124 NatURE BioteCHNOLOGY | VOL 38 | OCTOBER 2020 | 1123–1126 | www.nature.com/naturebiotechnology correspondence The state of affairs Remarkably, engagement was also very toward any other part. Therein lies the true The most successful citizen science high, with an average of 100 tasks solved power and challenge of this approach. initiatives have reported several hundreds per participant. Overall, these statistics Enter Borderlands Science: an of thousands of volunteers, and eventually represent a considerable improvement over intersectoral collaboration between more than a million if we aggregate statistics those of previous projects. The rationale scientists, engineers and game developers from distinct projects using the same for the approach taken by MMOS is both that strives to demonstrate the formidable infrastructure over years of operation. simple and efficient; instead of trying to potential of an alliance of citizen science and Notably, following a pattern commonly attract users to yet another third-party the highest profile AAA games. Borderlands observed in user participation, the majority website, bring citizen science to the virtual Science is a casual tile-matching game of the contribution is completed by the universes that users already inhabit. This (inspired from the previous SDG Phylo) that participants during the first days or weeks strategy is even more powerful given that is distributed within Borderlands 3 — a fast following the launch of the project. To gamers are already expert at developing action role-playing first-person video game. prevent this drop-off, projects like Stall problem-solving skills. Each puzzle in Borderlands Science is made Catchers or EyeWire organize various events With the introduction of Project of fragments of microbial 16S ribosomal and competitions to renew participant Discovery, citizen science entered the AAA RNA gene sequences collected by the interest and maintain engagement. Foldit video game scene. (AAA is an informal American Gut Project13, and the results are and EteRNA also regularly unveil new classification used for video games aggregated to improve a reference alignment challenges and datasets designed to produced and distributed by a mid-sized of millions of sequences. support research in different areas, such as or major publisher, typically having a high At first glance, the match between user COVID, tuberculosis or synthetic biology. development and marketing budget.) But base and scientific problem seems unlikely. Nevertheless, in the best case, the volume another crucial step is needed to make The fast-paced, first person shooter–looter of work generated reaches a couple of this approach broadly accepted by both game filled with dark humor is primarily hundreds of hours of work per day10. researchers and game developers. Eve designed for gamers seeking adventure and Although such a number is useful, it Online is a very special game. The player action. But what could be a dead end turns hardly meets the demand of large-scale base is more mature and attuned to science out to be the strength of this initiative. science projects. than other player communities. The game A deployment in the Borderlands universe Therefore, despite undeniable successes is also slower paced and more complex, offers an opportunity to reach a public not not only in scientific impact but also in making it an almost too perfect match for particularly exposed to science, while at the science outreach to the general public, the citizen-science activities. same time it opens the door to a large and vision of online citizen science initiatives is The deployment of SDGs within strong online community of players who can still out of range of current methodologies. fast-paced games with a wide and diverse carry and amplify the impact of this initiative. A model based on distributing scientific audience is the next frontier. It has the To complete this picture, the partnership tasks through a web page or mobile potential to bring millions of contributors to with the Microsetta Initiative (the parent application managed by academic the most ambitious scientific endeavors, but organization of the American Gut Project) researchers appears to have reached its comes with new challenges. The integration provides another central piece of this project. limits. Even when a project benefits from of these new activities must preserve the Only a long-term scientific endeavor with extensive media coverage, the core of its immersion experience and seamlessly apparent benefits for the public can trigger audience remains confined to participants integrate into the ecosystem of the host the interest of a large audience and justify the already naturally interested in the scientific platform. Whereas a game like Foldit scale of such an enterprise. subjects, which is unfortunately only a small requires extensive training and substantial fraction of the population. investment