FoldIt, Protein folding as a game.

FoldIt is the game of folding proteins.  I started playing in August 2010.  After about a year I took a couple of years off.  I started folding again this spring.  I guess I'm helping science.  I don't know.

Proteins rapidly fold into their natural state once built by Ribosomes. They can be denatured by temperature, PH, or in other ways but once conditions are right they will fold again into the same complex shape.  Unfortunately science doesn't have good algorithms to predict their shape from the string of amino acids.  The technology is developing rapidly.  It has a long ways to go.

The assertion is humans are better at folding than software alone.  Humans, using their intuitions, can see problems and adjust.  By playing the game, science can build a huge database of moves humans make while folding proteins and use this database to improve the automation.  The FoldIt players have scored well in global competition but mostly it's just a hand full of players.  I don't know if the rest of us add any value at all.  Here I am after about 45 minutes of play.  Most of the score came in the first 15 minutes:

I'm in 94th place in the Global Soloist scoreboard.  This shows the problem.  While I can tell the protein fold is a mess I'm just learning about the tools available to me.  A string of hydrophilic amino acids usually form a helix, In this game the hydrophilic AA have blue side chains and the hydrophobic AA have orange side chains.  The hydrophobic AA usually end up in the middle of the protein grouped together and the hydrophilic AA end up on the outside.  This puzzle says it's an Integrase.  Wikipedia show them folding as a series of helixes.  If I had a bunch of time on my hands I'd restructure the protein as a series of helixes and see but I'm just trying to maintain my global position so won't be spending much time.  As it turns out there are websites I'll not mention here that will help you categorize a string of amino acids and provide their common motif.  Rosalind is helping me learn about these databases and more.

I may have to quite folding for awhile so I can keep up on Coursera and Rosalind.