Foldit
Last week there was a pretty cool story in the news about online gamers deciphering the structure of an enzyme that had long plagued scientists. This happened through an online puzzle game called Foldit.
Foldit is a multiplayer online game, put together by a the University of Washington’s biochemistry and computer science departments. The idea was to utilize the ingenuity and three dimensional problem solving skills of online gamers towards solving difficult protein structure prediction problems. Firas Khatib of the university’s biochemistry lab says “We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed.”
Well, it worked. And last week, the coolest story I personally read about was that gamers have helped work out the structure of a monomeric protase enzyme that had stumped scientists for over a decade. And get this, they did it in just three weeks. And as if that’s not cool enough, this discovery provides new insight into antiretroviral drugs, and is getting particular attention as a step in the fight against HIV.
If you would like to read the published article from Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, here is a link to where Foldit has posted the PDF.
http://fold.it/portal/node/990358
And here I just wanted to include a few links to other articles about this subject.
Enjoy!…
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/online-gamers-crack-aids-enzyme-puzzle-20110919-1kgq2.html
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/09/18/online-gamers-crack-aids-enzyme-puzzle/