Genomic Ranger

Genomic Ranger
The memo's illustration: a cowboy in a red neckerchief before a wall of the letters TGCA
Developer(s)	Molecular Reality Corporation
Publisher(s)	Molecular Reality Corporation
Platform(s)	Maxine's Quest (planned)
Release	Unreleased
Genre(s)	Genomics

Genomic Ranger is a planned game about genomics by Molecular Reality Corporation. The company's 2021 advertisement offered it as "adventure across the genomic landscape of structural variations",^[1] and the 2022 memo "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest" gives its inspirations as "Combat, Gunslinger", two duels for the Atari 2600, together with the longest list of samples of any title.^[2] As in the company's other games, players were to run the samples through a nanopore and play with the signals. It had not been released by October 2026.

Structural variations, the subject of the advertisement's line, are rearrangements of 50 or more base pairs of DNA: pieces deleted, copied, turned around or moved to another chromosome. They are hard to see in the short fragments read by most sequencers and easier in the long reads of nanopore sequencing, where a single read can span a whole rearrangement.

The memo lists the samples as "Strawberry and spinach DNA, histones, intact nuclei, spermatozoa, HMW DNA, nucleotides, telomeres, G-quadruplexes, XNA, miRNA, Os-bpy-labeled DNA, epigenetic modifications, polytene chromosomes, transcriptome from the 'genomic range', DNA origami, RCA dna, CRISPR-dCas9 complexes on DNA", followed by "DNA polymerase activity" and "mi-RNA-21".^[a][2]

The list runs from the kitchen to the research bench. DNA is extracted from strawberries in school classrooms with dish soap, salt and cold alcohol, and the garden strawberry, which carries eight copies of each chromosome, yields plenty of it. HMW (high-molecular-weight) DNA is DNA kept in long unbroken strands, which long-read sequencing requires. Telomeres, the repeated sequences at the ends of chromosomes, are rich in guanine, and such strands can fold on themselves into four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes. Polytene chromosomes are the giant chromosomes of fly salivary glands, made of about a thousand copies of the same DNA lying side by side. In DNA origami, short "staple" strands fold one long strand into a chosen shape.^[3] A disabled CRISPR protein, dCas9, binds a chosen sequence without cutting it, and can serve as a marker along a strand. "Os-bpy-labeled DNA" carries osmium tags on particular bases; the founder later called a solid-state pore that reads DNA with such labels "the Holey Grail*", with the asterisk standing for "required labels but it's a damn good start."^[4] See Holey Grail.

Both named games are duels for the Atari Video Computer System, later called the Atari 2600. Combat (1977) was the cartridge packed with the console, a set of 27 battles between two tanks, biplanes or jets controlled by two players. Outlaw (1978) puts two cowboys on opposite sides of the screen, shooting at each other past obstacles; Sears sold it under its own Tele-Games label as Gunslinger. It was designed by David Crane, who in 1979 left Atari and co-founded Activision.^[b]

The memo's illustration combines the two subjects, a gunslinger in a broad hat standing before a wall covered in the letters of DNA. Ranger is also a character class in Dungeons & Dragons, from which the company took several of the character classes of Epic Quest Bio. The memo does not say whether the name refers to it.

On the 2021 sign-up form, which asked each new member which early game they would choose, "Genomic Ranger" received 18 of 135 votes in a sample of answers, fourth of seven.^[5]

• Knot sequencing
• Molecules of Mars