A group of videogame players solved in just over a week a problem of molecular biology that scientists from around the world weren’t able to solve in over a decade. These players have been able to decipher the enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that affects rhesus monkeys.
The retroviral protease enzymes such as the one that was deciphered have a key role in spreading the virus and understanding their structure is essential in order to create drugs that block them. The fundamental problem in this kind of research is that these enzymes are very complex molecules in which the bonds between atoms can have millions of different configurations. In order to create a drug it’s necessary to find out the most efficient configuration, which is the one the enzyme has in nature.
The game foldit was created through a collaboration between the departments of Computer Science, Engineering and Biochemistry of the University of Washington founded in 2008 with the aim of solving scientific problems. Since then over 236,000 players have registered to the portal.
An existing software for various platforms – not just Windows but also Linux and Mac OSX – allows anyone to give their contribution, perhaps small but nevertheless useful for solving one of the many scientific problems now available on the foldit portal concerning diseases but also environmental problems.
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In this case players started from a two-dimensional image of the enzyme and used their spatial skills to create a three-dimensional image of the molecule. The game in fact allows to rotate the images of molecules in cyberspace and try different solutions to try to understand its structure. In an attempt to solve a problem, various working teams send their solutions helping to gradually improve the result.
Players’ efforts allowed biochemists at the University of Washington to have a result good enough that it could be refined in order to determine the structure of the enzyme in a short time.
This is obviously a tremendous achievement. Scientists have made a big step forward in the search for effective drugs against AIDS and involved a lot of common people showing that science can be a game and at the same time extremely useful from a practical point of view. Too often, people ignorant about videogames are ready to claim that they’re a waste of time and sometimes they even say that playing leads to violence. In this case, playing is going to help save who knows how many lives in the future.
