Foldit! Who Said Learning Protein Biochemistry Wasn't Fun?
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While surfing the web, I came upon a cool website called Foldit. Foldit is an online competitive, interactive protein folding game that showcases the principles and properties of protein biochemistries.
The game, originally created by David Baker, Zoran Popović and David Salesin, works like this. Players are given a ribbon model of a protein made up of amino acids. Players use the cursor to grab, bend, pull, and wiggle the chain of amino acids anywhere along its length, folding the protein into its optimum shape. The only rules are based on physics—opposite charges attract, atomic bonds have limited angles of rotation, and the parts of the molecule that stick to water tend to point outward. The closer your model's properties adhere to those rules, the more points you get. The goal of the game was to get large numbers of players to work on potentially difficult protein folding problems to come up with possible solutions. And it seems to be working. More than 100,000 people have downloaded Foldit since its release in 2008, turning the game into a large, worldwide, multiplayer competition.
Check out the YouTube Foldit video to learn how it works!
Please visit the Foldit site and blog for more information.
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Protein Folding!!!!!!
