With the tagline “Made by humans, scored by Nature,” the video game EteRNA is the latest in a growing craze of online science games that aim to harness the power of crowd-sourcing to uncover fundamental principles of biology.

Following in the footsteps of FoldIt, where players compete to find new protein structures, and Phylo, a game released last month in which participants use DNA sequences to uncover evolutionary relationships between species, the goal of EteRNA is to design new virtual RNA molecules based on computer models, with the top designs eventually being synthesized and tested out in the lab.

It might not become as popular as Angry Birds or Farmville, but the program’s developers hope that EteRNA will capture the competitive streak of citizen-scientists to help researchers find new tools in nanotechnology. “The dream is that within a year or so we will be able to create RNA that is functional and that we can transcribe into cells to do things such as sense light or even deactivate a virus,” said Stanford physicist Rhiju Das, one of EteRNA’s designers, told the New York Times.

In the following video, EteRNA developer Adrien Treuille, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who also helped create FoldIt, describes the rationale behind the game.