Foldit, the protein folding video game extravaganza!!1one

Andrew

That's right, a new game called Foldit has combined puzzle problem solving with protein folding reserach. It's free to play and you might help researchers make tremendous steps in biological research.

As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

lGYJyur4FUA

Play today and cure Cancer/HIV/Alzheimer's.

Sail

Wow, that's ingenious. I can't wait till when I get time to mess with it.

Apreche

I tried to download it, but their server was dead. I'll try again now.

kiwi_bird

I'm about to check if I can get it to work in WINE..

Apreche

I just played it. It's very interesting, but it's not very fun.

Andrew

So, I finally got around to playing it today. I think it's a good time waster, something that you can spend 10-15 minutes on at a time. I got a Top 10 score on E. Coli ^_^

kiwi_bird

Playing it with a graphic tablet is really fun. ^^

Victor Frost

The narrator sounds a lot like the Emily from her audio drama "Doppleganger".