Have more researcher-driven puzzle creation requests. For example, some researcher wants a 3 state RNA design with a certain aptamer in it. So they share that and players create. Then, researcher says, now I want to include this factor included in it… and so on. So eterna becomes more of an extension of researcher-driven brainstorm/ideas that they don’t have time to pursue. And puzzle creators have sense they are connected/engaged to researchers/meaningful work. Sequential steps makes it easier for design and skill progression and easy for researcher to informally brainstorm.
I think researchers don’t do this because they think they need to have a better/more formulated idea first. But that thinking loses the advantage of eterna. Sharing early unbaked ideas and having eterna community begin to pursue and develop capabilities to move in that direction.
Certainly researchers are more than welcome to make requests now here in the forum and other community platforms! Looking more to the community for research targets has actually been discussed, with the big limitation being the lack of feature support in the puzzle maker (which is quite a large task). It could be neat to have a formal request mechanism in the website, but we’d need to see if that’s a feature that would be used often enough that it would be beneficial to have that over just posting in the forum.
This is an EXCELLENT idea. Any avenue that promotes our scientific relevance/benefit and makes eteRNA capabilities more widely known and engaged in by the player community is what will keep us strong and on a growth trajectory. If a major barrier is the lack of feature support in the puzzle maker, let’s define what it can/cannot do and promote the positive. Since inception, everything about eteRNA has been about evolution and change over time, has it not? (Just look at the critically needed re-build you are doing now.) If the science community begins to see value, what better recruiting tool to help both parties achieve mutual goals.