Designed as a game with a purpose, players solve pattern-matching puzzles that represent nucleotide sequences of different phylogenetic taxa to optimize alignments over a computer algorithm.

High-scoring player alignments are collected as data and sent back to the McGill Centre for Bioinformatics to be further evaluated with a stronger scoring algorithm.

Producing such an optimal multiple sequence alignment is usually determined with a dynamic programming algorithm that finds the most probable evolutionary outcome by minimizing the number of mutations required.

Once a puzzle is chosen, a few of the genetic sequence fragments for each species to be aligned, represented as coloured blocks, are each placed on a single row of a grid.

A player wins and is allowed to submit their sequence alignment to the database by matching or surpassing the final par score generated by the computer for each puzzle.

[1] In 2013, Phylo developers built a webserver called Open-Phylo (now defunct) that allows researchers to upload their own sets of sequences for players to align.