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Foldit Player May Have Created a Useful Protein
An anonymous reader writes "The organizers of the game Foldit, where you fold proteins for scientific research, announced that a user has found a protein that may be able to bind influenza viruses. Researchers plan to test the protein in a lab over the next few weeks to see if it might be medically useful."
Hint: Not the player.
Top protein names are "ASS" and "POO"
And who gets the patent(s), money etc. for this particular protein?
I guess it's whoever spends the hundreds of millions of dollars to follow up on the infinitesimal chance that this will lead to something useful?
sic transit gloria mundi
I played fold.it for a few months a year and half ago. I was better than most at it, but there was one guy who almost always got the best score on every protein he worked on. He was a mutant at it; the Michael Jordan of protein folding. I joked that it was like The Last Starfighter , he was being selected for being taken off planet by the aliens who developed the game. He had a way of identifying parts of a protein that could be modified to improve it. By studying people like him...on what they see that nobody else does, can lead to improved automated algorithms, which can lead to significant improvements in medicines.
Finding optimal folds of proteins is an NP-Hard problem, so having any heuristic algorithm improvements can vastly increase the chance of having automated tools find useful folds in reasonable amounts of time.