cellMatch

Game to match protein sequences

This is a simple game to emulate the cell's capability to recognize protein sequences. Each time, the user will generate a protein bullet with a sequence tag, the user must then shoot the bullet to one of the three locations tagged with most similar protein sequence. A right match will be rewarded and a miss will decrease your health state. Playing this game will improve your sequence pattern recognition capability. Development of this game is supported by NSF grant BIO-DBI-0845381 for protein localization research conducted at the University of South Carolina.Homepage: http://mleg.cse.sc.edu Beat the cell's capability for protein pattern recognition! Background Story of the Biology A living cell has amazing capability to send proteins to the right locations within the cellular machine. Each protein has an inherent molecular "zipcode" that determine where this protein should go after its birth. However, the molecular zipcodes for a given location are not identical but conform to certain rules represented mostly by regular expression patterns such as K[KR]*[KR], which means any protein sequence with K as the first amino acid, K or R as the second, anything as the third, and K or R as the 4th amino acid can be recognized by the cellular machine and be transported to Nucleus. These patterns are called molecular motifs which determines the functions of proteins. In this CellMatch game, player is given a fighter jet which can shoot a protein sequence pattern bullet to one of three targets (locations). The player must shoot the target with the most similar sequence pattern to get reward points. If missed, player's health status will be decreased. We have set different levels to match to your improved sequence pattern matching capability.Development of this game is supported by NSF grant BIO-DBI-0845381 for protein localization research conducted at the Machine Learning and Evolution Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of South Carolina. Homepage: http://mleg.cse.sc.edu