Applause! Gamers Decipher AIDS-Like Enyzme
Better still, they get credit for it too.
A selection of amino acid polymers in macromolecule form, yesterday
To many gamers NSMB just stands for New Super Mario Brothers but for a select few it's now been replaced with Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. Gamers worldwide contributing to a online folding game have cracked a problem that has stood for ten years, collaborating to decipher the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus. Even better? They're getting credit for it along with the scientists.
Folding isn't new. There are countless programs out there, running in the background, that see PCs around the world help out with scientific projects from the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence to cracking protein molecules; even your PS3 has a built-in Folding system. Foldit, however, is a fun-for-purpose game where teams compete against each other while helping the research scientists from the University of Washington.
The research team were working on this enzyme for nearly a decade. The gamers had it cracked in just three weeks. Amazing what the spirit of competition can do! Firas Khatib from the University's biochemistry labs said "The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems."
Seth Cooper, one of the creators of Foldit, agreed. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week's paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before."
Of course, this is only one puzzle that has been sorted; there's still hundreds out there that need help from gamers over the world. If you're interested (and by golly, you should be) head on over to Foldit and start playing.
Source: Foldit
Folding isn't new. There are countless programs out there, running in the background, that see PCs around the world help out with scientific projects from the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence to cracking protein molecules; even your PS3 has a built-in Folding system. Foldit, however, is a fun-for-purpose game where teams compete against each other while helping the research scientists from the University of Washington.
The research team were working on this enzyme for nearly a decade. The gamers had it cracked in just three weeks. Amazing what the spirit of competition can do! Firas Khatib from the University's biochemistry labs said "The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems."
Seth Cooper, one of the creators of Foldit, agreed. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week's paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before."
Of course, this is only one puzzle that has been sorted; there's still hundreds out there that need help from gamers over the world. If you're interested (and by golly, you should be) head on over to Foldit and start playing.
Source: Foldit
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