Crowdsourcing Comes of Age For Molecular Modeling and Drug Discovery
Crowdsourcing—using the collective talent of the Internet to solve problems—has been increasingly used to solve problems and find solutions in the computer software and electronics industry. Over the past few years, several forward-thinking life scientists had proposed the idea that crowdsourcing could possibly be used to solve the molecular structure of proteins that could be used as drug targets. To bring this possibility to reality, in 2008 a team of scientists at the University of Washington created an online, interactive, protein-folding game call Foldit that showcased the principle and properties of protein biochemistry. The thought was that Foldit and its worldwide cadre of users could be used to solve the molecular structure of certain proteins. Since 2008, over 100,000 have downloaded Foldit software and turned into a large, worldwide, multiplayer competition.
Earlier this week a group of scientists reported in the journal Nature Structure & Molecular Biology that Foldit users helped them to determine the molecular structure of a simian HIV protease that had baffled scientists for 15 years. The actual three dimensional structure of the protein that was predicted by Foldit was confirmed by X-ray crystallography. According to the paper’s authors (that included the Foldit players who helped solve the protein’s structure),
“Although much attention has recently been given to the potential of crowdsourcing and game playing, this is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem. These results indicate the potential for integrating video games into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”
Crowdsourcing is a new concept that is beginning to be embraced by the life sciences community including academics as well as industrial scientists. To learn more about crowdsourcing and its use in drug discovery and design, please read an article that I wrote for LifeScienceLeader this past July.
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Gaming!!!!!!!!!
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By now, I think that most BioJobBlog readers understand that the job market for life scientists is lousy and that it isn’t likely to improve anytime soon. I know that many of you have spent close to 10 years training for a shot at an R&D job but the reality is that everybody needs to work to put food on the table—whether or not you find a job in your chosen profession. To that end, now may be a good time for those of you who are finding it difficult to land a job to consider one more year of training to get a certificate in a field that keeps you in science but not in R&D.
A team of scientists from the UK report in this week’s edition of Nature that they were able to induce the formation of ribonucleotides using ribose, phosphate and the bases adenine, uracil, guanine and cytosine and environmental conditions that may have been present in the early history of the Earth. This had been a fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life on Earth. 