FOLDIT REVISITED—A SCIENTIFIC SUCCESS FOR VIDEOGAMERS.

FOLDIT REVISITED—A SCIENTIFIC SUCCESS FOR VIDEOGAMERS. I posted here a year ago about Foldit, “a videogame with 57,000 registered users, in which players score points by finding chemically stable configurations for chains of protein molecules.” Now, as this Yahoo article from AFP reports, Foldit has succeeded in producing an accurate model of one monomeric protease enzyme. The videogamers took three weeks to do it; apparently scientists had been working on the problem for ten years. Here is the introduction to the article in the journal “nature structural and molecular biology”. The title of the article: “Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players.” Apparently both videogamers and researchers are listed as co-authors. Another example of the wisdom of crowds.