Borderlands 3 is using its millions of gamers to help map the human gut microbiome

Back in April, Borderlands 3 – a big budget, role-playing first-person shooter videogame that sold over 8 million copies within six months of its release – received a free update that introduced a new mini-game to its players.

Taking the form of a retro-style arcade cabinet in the home base’s medical bay, “Borderlands Science” has players shifting colored blocks between rows and columns to solve puzzles. Their successes are rewarded with in-game currency, which players can then use to better combat the aliens, mercenaries, machines and space cultists of the main game.

But Borderlands Science has a bit more than high-score calculations going on under the hood. The colored blocks and puzzles that it’s serving players each represent nucleotides and fragments of microbial 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequences, all of which were collected from human stool samples contributed to and sequenced by an open research platform called the American Gut Project.

Rather, Borderlands Science’s true goal is to help artificial intelligence iron out errors when organizing and analyzing those sequences en masse. By compiling the millions of matches that players are making, and then feeding them into a sequencing algorithm, the project aims to build a higher-quality body of data that researchers could someday use to develop novel health or wellness treatments.