Play the protein game!
You have spent ages protecting Earth against alien invaders and other evil fellows. Now it’s high time to leave your imaginary “Universe At War” for a while and contribute your game power to curing deadly diseases in reality. Researchers from Washington University around HHMI scientist David Baker recently provided the perfect opportunity for helpers: they launched an online protein folding computer game.
Its name is Foldit (http://fold.it/portal/adobe_main).
Foldit is a product of collaboration between computer science and biochemistry researchers from the HHMI at University of Washington. It’s a free game in which players compete to design proteins. The game teaches the competitors the basics of protein folding before letting them loose on real proteins from nature. Afterwards, HHMI scientists will test the freshly designed proteins to see if they make viable candidate compounds for new drugs.
At the moment, Foldit only uses proteins whose 3D structures have been solved. But soon puzzles will be introduced for which the solution is unknown.
The understanding of protein folding is the Holy Grail of biochemistry. Dozens of computer algorithms were created in the past to predict how a linear string of amino acids will fold into a given 3D structure (however, none of them acts properly). With Rosetta@Home, launched in 2005, Baker’s group once has created another legendary computer project to use computational methods for the prediction of protein structures. But this distributed computing project which currently pools the resources of 420,000 active PCs to a cumulative processing power of 62 TeraFLOPS (making trillions of calculations possible) has a drawback.
Computers do silly things occasionally.
The multiplayer online game Foldit could be a better way to go, Baker thinks. What do you think?
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment