In Borderlands 3, you can play a game within the game that supposedly helps sort DNA sequence in real life. How does it do that?
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It is protein folding. We have machines that can scan DNA. And the DNA encodes the sequences of amino acids to build proteins from. The protein folds together as the amino acids attract or repel each other in specific ways. The shape that the protein folds into is very important to how they work. But this is one problem which computers are very bad at. It is very hard for a computer to calculate the patterns and make good guesses to how the protein folds. It turns out that the human brain is much better at this then even large supercomputers.
The existing answers describing this as a protein-folding game are not really accurate. It’s a DNA matching game. The scientists have DNA strands from different kind of bacteria, and they want to learn more about how closely different bacteria are related in terms of evolution history by trying to match their DNA sequences. Of course, different bacteria never have EXACTLY the same DNA (or they wouldn’t be different), but there are shared sequences and similarities. But depending on how you line things up, you might get a better or worse match. The VERY BEST match is a useful indicator of shared evolutionary history, but worse matches exist that would underestimate the commonality.
This alignment problem turns out to be pretty hard to solve. Computers can try, but they sometimes get stuck finding a kind-of-ok but not very good alignment that underestimates how closely related two bacteria might be. Humans can sometimes do better (or can be used to redirect the computer that then further optimizes).
So how does the Borderlands Science mini game help? Well, at small scale the problem can be represented pretty well as a little matching game. There are only 4 little building blocks that make up DNA which is pretty easy to represent in game form, and matching games can be pretty fun. So scientists can pick a little section of two sequences that they think are related but that they don’t have a good match for yet. And give the humans scoring rules in the form of a game so that a better match scores higher. The gamers then look for better ways to match the sequences up, and try to get the highest score for a particular sequence pair. This high score then becomes a candidate for further optimization by a computer, or confirmation by a scientist to see if it leads to a better understanding of common DNA heritage.
For more details see https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/04/you-can-help-medical-science-just-by-playing-a-new-borderlands-mini-game/ which includes the video trailer introducing the game.
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