If you have been looking for a way to contribute to scientific research without having to take all those pesky classes, I have the site for you. Foldit is a game designed by the University of Washington that takes advantage of human being’s natural problem solving intuitions to help the cause of protein folding research.

Foldit!

In order to properly target a protein for use in creating drugs to help fight everything from AIDs to Cancer, scientists need to understand it’s structure. Protein folding prediction is the Science of discovering the most ideal structural configurations of proteins for particular tasks. Unfortunately, this is a time-consuming, expensive and difficult task.

This solution that UW came up with is to let human beings do the work that the computer systems find so difficult.

A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

If you have some time on your hands, why not give the game a twirl. It’s a bit complicated, but the videos should give you enough information to hop right in. Who knows, the time you waste today in the office could go towards curing a disease tomorrow.

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