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Gamers Beat Algorithms At Finding Protein Structures
jamie writes "Researchers have turned the biochemical challenge of figuring out protein folding structures into a computer game. The best players can beat a computerized algorithm by rapidly recognizing problems that the computer can't fix. From the article: 'By tracing the actions of the best players, the authors were able to figure out how the humans' excellent pattern recognition abilities gave them an edge over the computer. For example, people were very good about detecting a hydrophobic amino acid when it stuck out from the protein's surface, instead of being buried internally, and they were willing to rearrange the structure's internals in order to tuck the offending amino acid back inside. Those sorts of extensive rearrangements were beyond Rosetta's abilities, since the energy changes involved in the transitions are so large.'"
forget about Foldit! Just download Folding@Home and let your CPU/GPU do it for you!
FoldIt and Folding@Home are doing completely different things. FoldIt (or more specifically, the Rosetta software underneath it) is attempting to guess the final structure of novel protein sequences, using a variety of clever tricks such as mining the database of known structures for peptide motifs. It contains energy functions to evaluate candidate structures, but it is not simulating physical processes, and it tells you nothing about how the linear chain of amino acids forms the 3D structure. Folding@Home is used to study the process of protein folding, where the end result is already known; it isn't useful as a structure prediction tool. Both programs require a massive amount of computing power, but for very different reasons. Both are very useful, but there is almost no overlap in their practical applications. (And it should go without saying that while they can both be an excellent complement to experimental studies, neither can replace them.)