About the author

Bala Chandar

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If you’ve been interested in the Folding at Home project, but wanted to play a much more active role then your wait is over. Join Fold It!

Protein structure prediction: As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. 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.

I came across this interesting project from the HHMI Research News article.The game is a project developed by the Baker Lab.You can find more details about the game here. Have fun folding!