Posts Tagged ‘gamers’
Gamers Solve AIDS-Related Enzyme Puzzle, Helping Scientists Search for Novel Drugs
The players were able to reproduce the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from a virus that causes an AIDS-like disease in rhesus monkeys. The enzyme, a retroviral protease, is related to how the virus spreads. Several drug studies are working on ways to block this enzyme in HIV, but this is hard to do when you don’t know what it looks like.
After about three weeks of work, the gamers’ solutions were so refined that the researchers were able to solve the entire puzzle within a couple of days. The molecular structure was so clear, the researchers could even detect surfaces where drugs might be able to attach and deactivate the enzyme. The work is described in the journal , which gives credit to two Foldit teams.
As , the University of Washington's Foldit program lets puzzle-lovers solve complex protein-folding problems online. Scientists know the amino acid chains that make up proteins, but the ways in which these chains fold and curl into three-dimensional shapes is not well understood. Deciphering those structures can help researchers develop new drugs and therapies for cancer, Alzheimer’s, AIDS and other disorders. Foldit lets gamers give it a try, folding and twisting unique structures in ways that remain too complex for computers.
“People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,” said Seth Cooper, co-creator of Foldit and a researcher at UW Department of Computing Science and Engineering, in a statement. “Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans.”
The Foldit players built on each other’s work, coming up with new designs based on folds that worked and folds that failed. Over at Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle talked to one of the gamers — nicknamed "mimi" — to find out . The Nature paper's authors said as far as they know, this is the first time gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem.
“The critical role of Foldit players in the solution of the (enzyme) structure shows the power of online games to channel human intuition and three-dimensional pattern-matching skills to solve challenging scientific problems,” the authors write.
The best part about this news may be that there’s more to come. The UW team said they have two more papers in the pipeline, one regarding the algorithms in Foldit recipes and one regarding a brand-new synthetic protein, which was discovered through Foldit designs. Other teams may be able to tap these gamers’ creativity, leading to who knows what kind of new treatments and cures.
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Distributed Humans Smarter Than Distributed Computers In Solving Complex Biology Problem
The researchers, based at the University of Washington in Seattle, are incorporating the best Foldit players' strategies into their own algorithms. Forget distributed computing -- this is distributed thinking.
In what might be a video-game first, gamers will see their work translated into actual protein structures designed in the lab, according to the . Last year, a Texas player who goes by the name "BootsMcGraw" was the first Foldit player to have his new protein design synthesized in the lab. Though it didn't work, the researchers plan to try again and are optimistic about the possibilities, according to a press release from UW.
The program stems from Rosetta@home, which works like in that it uses a network of idle home computers to crunch data. Biologists were using Rosetta to figure out how proteins develop their final three-dimensional shapes. They know which amino acid chains make up proteins, but the way they're structured is not well understood, and that knowledge has huge potential, because proteins act as gatekeepers in the body.
Rosetta@home included a screensaver that showed users what the computer was doing. Sometimes the computer would get stuck on a tricky folding problem, but gamers thought it looked easy. "People started writing in saying, 'I can see where it would fit better this way'," says David Baker, a biochemist at UW in Seattle who developed Foldit, in Nature News.
Baker's team figured they would let them try it out, and the result was Foldit, wherein players can compete, collaborate, develop strategies, gather points and move to different levels.
It turns out that humans' highly evolved spatial manipulation talents were a boon for this type of problem-solving. Even a small protein can have hundreds of amino acids, meaning thousands of connections are possible -- and that means plenty of work for a computer. But humans can often see the solution intuitively, Nature News reports.
Even has turned to video games to make science more appealing, but as points out, this might be the first time gamers have helped solve an actual scientific question.
The paper's author list acknowledges more than 57,000 Foldit players, which may be unprecedented on a scientific publication, UW News says. Hey, it's got to be more satisfying than racking up ADAM.
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