CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY A team of gamers using eteRNA, an online RNA-building tool, published its initial findings in the Journal of Molecular Biology yesterday (February 16), offering new insights into the relationship between an RNA’s sequence and its structure. Although eteRNA data have been described in previous studies, this is the first time that players of the game—many who are not professional scientists—have led the publication of a scientific article on the subject.

“It’s important to capture these insights and make them both public and credible via publication in peer-reviewed journals,” study coauthor Rhiju Das of Stanford University, who helped create the game, said in a statement.

Das and colleagues launched EteRNA in January 2011 as a way of crowdsourcing human input for a problem that computers were struggling to solve: namely, how to design an RNA sequence that would fold into a particular shape. Players...