محمد اله بخش - ۱گروه بیوانفورماتیک، دانشکده فناوری نوین، دانشگه زابل
فاطمه فرهای - ۲بیوانفورماتیک، فناوری های نوین، دانشگاه زابل
علی مقصودی - ۳گروه بیوانفورماتیک، دانشکده فناوری های نوین، دانشگاه زابل

Crowdsourcing is a distributed computation model which relies on the human intelligence and wisdom of the crowd to solve problems [1,2], motivated by intrinsic or extrinsic motivations [3]. Crowdsourcing has a broad range of applications from simple tasks to complex tasks. [2] and also in bioinformatics [4]. Based on the intrinsic motivations, the concept of serious crowdsourcing games is devised. In serious games, users are engaged in games and entertainments tasks, while they are in fact solving a serious problem [5,6]. Serious games are applied to a wide range of problems in biology, healthcare, bioinformatics and so on [7, 8].Although there are some evidences for the promising application of serious games in bioinformatics, specifically for protein folding [9] and sequence alignment [10], there are still several issues that need more investigations and research. Selecting suitable players, providing interesting motivations, simplification of a complicated scientific problem to and easy-understandable game and quality control are just few examples of challenges that need to be studied. In this paper, we investigate the application of serious games in bioinformatics, identifying different aspects and dimensions of the area, challenges and opportunities, the research gaps and the future directions.

Crowdsourcing, Serious Games, Bioinformatics