May 13, 2008 -- While it may not carry the same buzz of the recently released Grand Theft Auto IV, Foldit is a new online game that holds grand promise.
Scientists hope the free, downloadable 3D puzzle game, similar to Tetris, may help speed research in developing a vaccine for HIV, creating chemicals that destroy harmful environmental contaminants, producing enzymes that break down cellulose into sugar that can then be turned into ethanol, and in solving problems that have vexed biochemists for years.
All of those solutions rely on a complicated field of science called protein folding. And the Foldit game offers new design solutions to this field.
"People are good at solving 3D puzzles," said Zoran Papovic, a computer scientist at the University of Washington who helped develop Foldit. "So why not let them figure them it out?"
Proteins are the workhorses of the body, performing all the functions that keep us alive. They are made up of long strings of different amino acids that twist and fold into various shapes. The 3D shape of the protein determines its job, whether that is stopping HIV from infecting cells or breaking down cellulose, the fibrous material that gives plants their strength.
Foldit grew out of a program called Rosetta@home that analyzed protein structure as a screen saver. As people watched they saw easy ways of solving big problems that stumped the program.
Computers, according to Popovic, are great at running lots of little calculations, but solving one big calculation, which a human can instantly see a solution to, will stop a computer. Foldit was created to give people a way to implement solutions that computers couldn't calculate.
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 Fold-it, 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."
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