Photos Finding New Ways to Fold
Foldit, released online last week, is like a game of 3D Tetris, but instead of a nice clean screen that blocks are added to, the player is presented with a haphazard-looking structure. The structure looks as if someone had casually thrown out a series of awkward-sized blocks that then stuck together. In Tetris, the player would then add blocks to fill up the gaps in the abstract structure. In Foldit, a player instead twists, pulls, pushes and shakes those blocks, which represent various amino acids, the building blocks of all proteins, into the correct shape. Once a player finds a solution to the puzzle biochemists at the University of Washington synthesize the compound in the lab. "They [Foldit players] are controlling what the next experiment in the wet lab will be," said Popovic. New puzzles are added to Foldit almost daily, and so far more than 30,000 people have downloaded the game. Jonathan King, a researcher who studies protein folding at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, won't be playing Foldit anytime soon, but says the new game will be useful to scientists. "It will help create some interesting design solutions," said King. "Players could come up with designs that scientists haven't seen before." A player doesn't need to need to be a biochemist to play Foldit either. ''We want people to have to not know anything about biochemistry," said Popovic, who already has plans to turn Foldit into a way to teach biochemistry to students as young as middle school. "Already non-experts are beating the the crap out of the biochemists." Related Links: |
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