Science has led to a lot of progress , not only in terms of scientific knowledge but also in terms of how that information and knowledge is acquired! For all the video gamers slash science lovers, there is a perfect game for you - FoldIt. It is an online puzzle game which lets you get familiar with the protein folding problem. University of Washington's Center for Game Science in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry have developed this game as a part of experimental research.
The objective of this game is to fold the given set of protein in a stable configuration so that none of the chains are clashing, there are no voids, and all hydrogen bonds are being sufficed, using various tools provided within the game. The highest scoring solutions of each of the difficult levels ae analyzed by researchers to find whether such structural confirmation exists in the native state in the real world!
The beta version was released to public in May 2008 and has 240,000 registered players as per the source. Since 2008, the Foldit project has participated in Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiments. CASP is an international experiment for protein structure prediction taking place every two years since 1994, which helps scientists to assess the efficacy of the protein folding predictions!
There have been quite a few remarkable accomplishments by FoldIt users. One of the most important one being deciphering the crystal structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) retroviral protease, an AIDS-causing monkey virus and producing an accurate 3D model of the enzyme in just 10 days of release the puzzle in 2011. This problem had been bothering scientists for over 15 years! This was published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology in 2011 (link of the published study).
The other accomplishment was regarding an enzyme which catalyses the Diels-Alder reactions widely used in synthetic chemistry. A team including David Baker in the Center for Game Science at University of Washington in Seattle computationally designed this enzyme. However, the enzyme still required improvement for potency which was done by FoldIt players by adding 13 amino acids. This increased the enzyme's activity by more than 18 times, thus, making it potent! This was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2012 (link of the published study).
If you are good at video games too or folding proteins, you may try the game too - Link. There are many tutorials and videos also available to help you get started! You never know, you might be lucky enough to decode a protein which helps find the cure to another disease!
Image source: All images have been taken from FoldIt website!
