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CONTRIBUTING to cancer research is now as simple as playing a game on your smartphone.

Each cell in your body contains about 2 metres of DNA, folded up and tightly packed. The precise structure matters, because in cancer, unwanted changes in the arrangement of DNA can interfere with the functioning of genes.

Marc Mart铆-Renom at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, and his colleagues want to create a 3D map of the DNA inside cancer cell lines 鈥� cancer cells adapted to being grown in the laboratory 鈥� to better understand what cancer DNA rearrangements look like and how they disrupt gene function. By downloading the , you can help the team achieve this goal.

The game is like a puzzle, with each piece representing a real DNA fragment, identified through analysis of a breast cancer cell line by the GENIGMA team. By playing with the order of the pieces, you can help the team uncover possible rearrangements associated with cancer 鈥� and score points in the process.

Mart铆-Renom and his team have already solved one aspect of the puzzle: their research in the laboratory has identified fragments of DNA that interact with each other a lot. This suggests they are in close proximity to one another in the cancer cell line. But they need your help to work out the precise order that the fragments are in. Your score in the game weighs the total number of interactions between all the different fragments. The higher your score is, the closer you are to identifying the true configuration of DNA fragments.

I am very competitive, so I love the fact that the game pits you against other players to achieve a record score. This competitive aspect helps the GENIGMA researchers too, because they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd: once at least 40 players have achieved a top score on the same challenge, that particular game is considered solved, and the scientists can use the information to map the corresponding region of DNA.

Mart铆-Renom and his team have also developed algorithms to try to solve the same DNA puzzles, but currently these aren鈥檛 able to scour the entire genome because this would require a prohibitive amount of computer power, he says. 鈥淲e think that the citizens 鈥� the intelligence of the group 鈥� will give us more interesting results,鈥� says Mart铆-Renom.

Happily, more than 30,000 people across 130 countries have played the GENIGMA game so far and the team has already solved the puzzle for an entire chromosome in the breast cancer cell line. If you install the GENIGMA app, you can also share your progress with other players on social media using the hashtag .

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