Foldit (the game)
The protein folding game
Its mostly known that gaming and Biochemistry are two worlds that mostly live in their own universe. As a casual gamer I stick to the Nintendo franchise or mostly play Skyrim on my PS4, nothing to write home about. Then I stumbled across this game so I figured I needed to talk about it.
This game is something you wont find in the next release of the PS5 or Xbox X, this game ( Fold it) was designed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. Originally it started as a screensaver called Rosetta@home that consisted on using the users computer power to attempt on folding auto generated proteins, but when complains of users not being able to manipulate them themselves, they came up with the game. (More about it in the next blog)
What this game is trying to achieve is to fold the provided proteins as best as possible, then if you score a high enough score, your solution could be looked into and analyzed and it can be applied relatively in the real word. The target for these scientist is to see if these solutions that people come up with could help with biological innovations or help target diseases.
The game benefits many fields in medicine! But also the field of Bioinformatics which is the field of Data Science that helps build software tools to analyze biological data. Bioinformatics uses biology, computer science, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret the biological data.
The data gathered in this game helps in identifying natural proteins’ structural configurations and enables scientists to understand them better specially when it comes to developing and analyzing viral protein structures.
“Foldit attempts to apply the human brain’s three-dimensional pattern matching and spatial reasoning abilities to help solve the problem of protein structure prediction. 2016 puzzles are based on well-understood proteins. By analyzing how humans intuitively approach these puzzles, researchers hope to improve the algorithms used by protein-folding software.” Nat Commun
This game may not have the graphical power of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, its more like a 2011 Java Script game that you came across the history of your school’s computer browser but after trying it and experimenting with it you find it quite entertaining.
Finally, as a Data Scientist in the making I can only imagine the data that has been gathered and analyzed by the group of Bioinformatics! Some of Foldit player achievements consist of:
- “Build protein structures into crystallographic, high-resolution maps more accurately than expert crystallographers or automated model-building algorithms” PLOSBiology
- “Players working collaboratively develop a rich assortment of new strategies and algorithms; unlike computational approaches, they explore not only conformational space but also the space of possible search strategies”. HHMI
- A letter in Nature described the analysis of proteins designed by Foldit players. Four player-designed proteins were successfully grown in E. coli and then “solved” via X-ray crystallography. The proteins were added to the Protein Data Bank as 6MRR, 6MRS, 6MSP, and 6NUK.
Now, if i have peaked your interest, I invite you to check out Foldit for yourself! It’ll be a good way to keep busy during this quarantine and also help out a little too!
