The Baker lab at the University of Washington has been influential in the development of computational tools to model protein folding.  They are most well known for the ROSETTA package, which does a fantastic job in many cases of predicting a protein fold based on fragments of other known structures.

They have now developed a protein folding game, of all things, called FoldIt!.  The user registers for an account on the website and downloads a program which runs the game locally.  As of now they only have Windows and Mac clients, but I got the game running under Wine no problem.

FoldIt! presents the player with “puzzles” which involve resolving steric clashes in the proteins.  The easy tutorial levels teach you how to play the game (which mostly involves clicking and dragging on different parts of the protein), and you’re guided by a funny cartoon version of Dr. Baker himself.  You get points based on how “good” your solution to the puzzle is, and complete a given puzzle when you cross a certain threshold score.

It’s sort of fiendishly fun to play, although maybe that’s just because I’m a biochemist.  It also seems like it would make a GREAT learning tool for use in biochemistry courses.  You can form groups as well, so it might be fun to make a group out of your class and see how highly they can place.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Biochemistry, games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.