Foldit

= Citizen Science project in the field of biology

URL = http://fold.it/portal/

Description

Dave Munger:

"turns proteins of scientific interest into increasingly complex puzzles that players can solve. Huge, complicated proteins are the building blocks of life; scientists and medical researchers are increasingly looking to protein synthesis as a way to cure disease, scrub pollutants from the air or water, or create new biofuels. Users compete to predict the tertiary structure of such proteins—how a protein’s chemical makeup causes it to fold in on itself—in order to help scientists find new protein functions.

The game starts with simple puzzles that replicate the structure of proteins, but gradually gets more complex. Ultimately the researchers behind the project hope to show that humans playing these games are better than computer simulations at predicting the structure of proteins. I didn’t get very far in this game, however: As the proteins got more complex, the program became progressively less stable on my computer (a Mac). But thousands of users have downloaded the game and have already made real progress solving thorny biochemistry problems." (http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/creating_citizen_scientists/)