Anyone remember the Folding@Home distributed protein folding screensaver? The people behind it have now come out with
FoldIt, the same basic idea but in game form. Instead of having your computer do the folding in the background, the goal is to have you do the folding yourself. It is essentially a puzzle game, trying to rearrange the protein backbone and functional groups to get a higher "score" (or minimize the free energy, if you know molecular biology). You need to make sure bits of the structure don't overlap, that certain parts are towards the middle and others towards the edge, and try to get particular bits to line up.
The program itself is pretty sophisticated, with an almost infinite undo/redo, and a graph showing your score per move that lets you easily go back to a particular point. There are online leaderboards, the ability to work off of other peoples' results, live chat between players, co-op and versus mode, and a bunch of other features. The game is free on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Here is a screenshot:
And
Here is a youtube video showing the gameplay.
Note that these are both from much older versions of the game, the current version has a lot better graphics, and doesn't have the cell-shaded look.
What are the Goals of Foldit? Goals of the Intro Puzzles The Intro Puzzles are meant to familiarize new players with the basic concepts and tools they'll need to start folding proteins in Foldit's Science Puzzles.
Goals of the Science Puzzles The current series of Science Puzzles, the Grand Challenges, are meant to generate the evidence needed to prove that human protein folders can be more effective than computers at certain aspects of protein structure prediction. That's what all the puzzles in Foldit are about right now: predicting the structure of a protein based on its amino acid sequence. The three rules mentioned above describe the characteristics of correct protein structures.
Goals of Foldit For protein structure prediction, the eventual goal is to have human folders work on proteins that do not have a known structure. This would require first attracting the attention of scientists and biotech companies and convincing them that the process is effective. Another goal is to take folding strategies that human players have come up with while playing the game, and automate these strategies to make protein-prediction software more effective. These two goals are more or less independent and either or both may happen.
The more interesting goal for Foldit, perhaps, is not in protein prediction but protein design. Designing new proteins may be more directly practical than protein prediction, as the problem you must solve as a protein designer is basically an engineering problem (protein engineering), whether you are trying to disable a virus or scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's also a relatively new field compared to protein prediction. There aren't a lot of automated approaches to protein design, so Foldit's human folders will have less competition from the machines.
Topic: FoldIt (Read 2170 times)
