Gamers on FoldIt Beat Lvl. 40 Retrovirus Boss, Make Scientists Look like Nancies
This isn't actually an HIV protein, it's one of those delicious baby bell soft cheeses.
If you’re a well-rounded geek, you probably already know about the site FoldIt. FoldIt takes advantage of the fact that lots of people like to play video games while simultaneously being told they’re helping save humanity. Since after all, the human brain is actually pretty good at figuring out how proteins fold most efficiently and folding proteins is kind of fun, FoldIt takes advantage of offsite parallel wetware processing in much the same way as SETI@home takes advantage of your computer’s down-cycles to massively parallel process noises from the galaxy. In other words, they made a game that uses the human brain’s natural ability to wiggle, shake and twist protein chains until they fold up into their natural state.
CORRECTION: In the comments, you’ll see that my comparison of FoldIt and SETI@home was a little confusing to some readers. Thanks to peteROC, I realized why – the program folding@home operates more or less exactly like SETI@home, using your computer’s down-cycles to process protein folding. The tip-off I left about “wetware processing,” meaning that the “down cycles” used were individual human brains (and not massive, distributed parallel processing on home PC’s and Playstation 3′s) was obviously a lot more clear to me, as the author, than the readers. That’s my mistake.
It turns out that this time the gamers at FoldIT really are helping save lives – the HIV, like every other virus, has a shell made of proteins; figuring out the structure of those proteins is key in designing drugs to combat the HIV. Unfortunately, it’s also really, really difficult. Like, really-smart-dudes-in-white-coats-working-for-a-decade-with-no-joy difficult. Or it was, until University of Washington biochemist Firas Khatib uploaded the unfolded protein to FoldIt. It took gamers 3 weeks to determine the working structure of the protein in such detail that the researchers were able to identify the structures they want to target with anti-virals.
If you’re interested in FoldIt (and having your name as co-author on a scientific paper if you figure out the solution to a high-end protein problem like this one), the link is above. Who knows, you might actually get to save the world in this game. (In addition, if you like puzzle games, FoldIt’s actually pretty fun.)
Sources
iO9
Argonne National Laboratory (image)
I’m not really curious why this article is mentioning four month old news, because it’s still pretty good news. I’m not really curious why the media enjoys insulting scientists, despite the fact UW scientists were smart enough to create FoldIt in order to solve problems through crowdsourcing instead of supercomputer teraFLOPS.
I’m curious why you would link SETI@home with no mention of Folding@home. Considering Folding@ is *formally* available on the Playstation 3 (regardless of Linux support) while SETI is not officially supported on any console. Fair to say more people have heard of SETI, but starting an article with “well-rounded geek” and then coming up short with the references isn’t giving much credit to us well-rounded geeks. :)
@Brackynews: I did link to FoldIt in the first paragraph. And referenced it again in the third. Because this is the anonymous internet where caustic sarcasm is the coin of the realm, let me just point out that part of my day job is as an environmental scientist and I’m not offended by humorous hyperbole.
Justin, you are mistaken. Foldit is a game that people play to fold proteins as a puzzle game. Fold@home is something similar to SETI@home, which uses downtime CPU to try folding proteins with computer algorithms. Foldit is the system that led to a published paper.
@PeteROC – Clearly, that was a poor comparison for me to make; I didn’t intend for the comparison to be drawn that FoldIT (which I am familiar with) used dispersed processing to deal with folding the proteins. I had no intention of referencing folding@home, but I can see where Brackynews was coming from. The reference to “wetware” processing was supposed to clue readers off to the fact that FoldIT uses players’ brains as the processors rather than their idle chip cycles. I’m going to make an edit for clarity.
Ahh idle brains = idle computers. haha that was a more of a jump than my brain was able to make. I see your comparison now, and I’m sure you can see why other readers thoughts jumped to folding@home. Thanks, Peter