EteRNA: How the CMU and Stanford RNA Design Game Works

EteRNA is an online citizen science game that was announced in January 2011 by investigators at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University. It asks players to design new ways of folding RNA molecules, and it was built for people without a science background.

Adrien Treuille, then an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, leads the project together with Rhiju Das, then an assistant professor of biochemistry at Stanford. Jeehyung Lee, a computer science doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon, led the development of the game. Das's laboratory at Stanford synthesized the molecules that players designed, and a grant from the National Science Foundation funded the project.

The scoring is what sets EteRNA apart from a puzzle with a built-in answer key. A design earns points when the molecule can assemble itself in a real laboratory, so the final judge is the chemistry and not the computer model. Lee added that a game meant to tap the wisdom of crowds had to expose players to every part of the scientific process, from design through experiment and analysis to the next design.

Each nucleotide appears on screen as a colored sphere: adenine is yellow, uracil blue, guanine red and cytosine green. Clicking the RNA changes a nucleotide and refolds the strand into its most stable shape. The challenge is to design sequences that fold properly in practice, not only on screen.

The top designs of each week go to the laboratory. Researchers then see whether the synthesized molecules fold into the three-dimensional shapes the computer models predicted. The developers wanted players to experience the whole loop of design, experiment, analysis of results and a better next design, because they saw rigorous scoring as essential once non-experts take part in the scientific method.

The stated aim was the first large-scale library of synthetic RNA designs. The project described RNA as a possible key regulator inside living cells and pointed to RNA-based switches and nanomachines that could one day seek out and control cells or disease-causing viruses.

No current page from the project's official address, eternagame.org, could be read in November 2026, so whether the game still takes new players is not confirmed here. The details above describe the game as announced in 2011.