Fold-it

The protein folding problem isn't normally associated with fun. Indeed, the intractable nature of predicting folding commonly leads to frustration, but Foldit is a welcome and thoughtful exception. Created as a tool that is both educational and has research applications, Foldit comes as a downloadable program (Mac, Windows, Linux) available upon free registration. After firing it up, users are presented with a set of folding principles (e.g., hydrophobic side chain associations) in the form of structures that must be optimized by dragging the structural elements to appropriate places in the screen images. Points are awarded for proper placement of side chains, thus graphically teaching principles of folding to all visual learners out there. There's more than fun and games to Foldit, though. Results from players' efforts are helping to answer the question of whether human intuition is useful for predicting folding by computers. Wouldn't that be great?

[http://fold.it/portal]