Fold.it – the Protein Folding Game
Posted on June 22, 2008 Comments (8)
Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This is another awesome combination of technology, distributed problem solving, science education…
Essentially the game works by allowing the person to make some decisions then the computer runs through some processes to determine the result of those decisions. It seems the human insight of what might work provides an advantage to computers trying to calculate solutions on their own. Then the results are compared to the other individuals working on the same protein folding problem and the efforts are ranked.
This level of interaction is very cool. SETI@home, Rosetta@home and the like are useful tools to tap the computing resources of millions on the internet. But the use of human expertise really makes fold.it special. And you can’t help but learn by playing. In addition, if you are successful you can gain some scientific credit for your participation in new discoveries.
Related: Expert Foldit Protein Folder, JSnyder – Researchers Launch Online Protein Folding Game – New Approach Builds Better Proteins Inside a Computer – Phun Physics – Protein Knots
The site includes some excellent educational material on proteins and related material. What is a protein:
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structure specifies the function of the protein. For example, a protein that breaks down glucose so the cell can use the energy stored in the sugar will have a shape that recognizes the glucose and binds to it (like a lock and key) and chemically reactive amino acids that will react with the glucose and break it down to release the energy.
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Proteins are involved in almost all of the processes going on inside your body: they break down food to power your muscles, send signals through your brain that control the body, and transport nutrients through your blood. Many proteins act as enzymes, meaning they catalyze (speed up) chemical reactions that wouldn’t take place otherwise. But other proteins power muscle contractions, or act as chemical messages inside the body, or hundreds of other things.
What are amino acids?
“The biochemists are getting beaten to a pulp by the regular players,” laughed Zoran Popovic, a UW computer scientist who with his graduate students Adrien Treuille and Seth Cooper worked with Baker to help create this interactive game dubbed “Foldit.”
Fold.it is supported by: Univ. of Washington Animation Research Labs, UW Baker Lab, HHMI, DARPA, Microsoft, and Adobe. The game is only available for Mac or Windows though so if you use Linux (Ubuntu…) you are out of luck (for now anyway).
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Tags: cool, fun, Funding, HHMI, innovation, K-12, protein, science webcasts, scientific inquiry, toys, webcasts
8 Responses to “Fold.it – the Protein Folding Game”
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June 22nd, 2008 @ 9:52 pm
This sounds really cool! I’ll have to let my husband know about this. He has one of his computers running a Folding@Home program that contributes to the research, so I’m sure he would love to play a game that does the same.
December 3rd, 2008 @ 11:04 am
I’ve recently been studying the physical work that proteins are able to do and find it to be amazing. They can essentially behave as tiny nano-robots. Some proteins are able to physically move inside the cell along a track (Kinesins and Dyneins for example) as if they were tiny nano-robots.
December 3rd, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
Proteins are fascinating. There are so many really cool areas of science. I didn’t really find biology that fascinating a subject in school, but i find much of in amazing now. I think a big part of the problem is we need to do a much better job of presenting this material. It is amazing. There has got to be better ways to present it to kids and students of all ages.
June 24th, 2010 @ 2:10 pm
There are so many really cool areas of science. I didn’t really find biology that fascinating a subject in school, but i find much of in amazing now. I think a big part of the problem is we need to do a much better job of presenting this material. It is amazing. There has got to be better ways to present it to kids and students of all ages. I’ve recently been studying the physical work that proteins are able to do and find it to be amazing. They can essentially behave as tiny nano-robots. Some proteins are able to physically move inside the cell along a track (Kinesins and Dyneins for example) as if they were tiny nano-robots.
March 20th, 2011 @ 11:22 pm
really want to try this game. looks like that this is a educational game. thanks for the review
July 29th, 2011 @ 7:55 pm
[…] I posted a few months ago about how you can participate in the protein folding, with the Protein Folding Game. […]
September 8th, 2011 @ 11:26 am
Foldit is incredible, I am all for games that contribute to society while being fun. I think more people should be trying to make work fun and similar to games.
January 3rd, 2015 @ 10:17 am
“Open any introductory biology textbook and one of the first things you’ll learn is that our DNA spells out the instructions for making proteins, tiny machines that do much of the work in our body’s cells. Results from a recent study show for the first time that the building blocks of a protein, called amino acids, can be assembled without blueprints – DNA and an intermediate template called messenger RNA (mRNA)…”