How does it work?

The user downloads the program from http://fold.it (requires a user account, downloads for Windows, Mac, Linux is coming) and goes through a number of tutorial proteins, in which all the parts of protein folding are explained.

For example, one part explains how hydrogen bridges make a protein stronger, so the more hydrogen bridges you can get within your protein the better.

Each action the user performs on the protein puts it in a different state, points are calculated based on a set of rules (such as the one described above, how many hydrogen bridges). These scores are used to determine how well a protein is folded, the higher the better.

User interaction

The user can completely control the protein (without breaking it) , but there are some convenience functions which help the user, such as “wiggle” which tries to fold the protein better from it’s current state. I don’t know the specific, but as far as I understand it this works similar to a genetic algorithm, it can reach the best solution possible, but most likely it will just reach a good solution. The user can push the protein over some negative state into a much better state and then let the “wiggle” feature clean up any collisions and improve it’s state a bit more.

This demonstrates where the researches hope Fold it will help in folding proteins compared to the supercomputers.

Competition and community

For each protein there is a list of people who folded it and what their top score was, this adds a sense of competition and community. A built in chat client further gives you the feeling you are not the only weirdo out there folding proteins. Users can form groups and there are also ranks per protein per group, so universities can for example group together and compete with other universities.

Not finished yet

The program does currently only allow users to fold existing proteins, but does not yet allow users to build/create and fold their own proteins. They expect to add this feature in about half a year which will further allow users to unleash their creativity on proteins.

Conclusion

As the site was just launched a week ago it is not clear if this will yield any results, an admin revealed in the chat that for one of the known proteiens a user had achieved a higher then known value, but he could not yet explain what that meant.

Since custom protein building will only be added later there is as of yet no idea whether this will bring anything usefull. The project can probably be called a success as 20,000 users were signed up in the first 2 weeks the project was live.

The developers have entered Fold it into CASP an international protein folding competition which is usually won by complex software running on supercomputers. This is a test to see if human creativity can beat incredible computational power.

So my conclusion at the moment is that this has great potential, but whether it will result in anything useful depends on whether the program judges these protein states correctly and whether or not these high scoring results can actually be used for anything.

I will keep an eye on any further news from the project and will try to fold some of proteins for the CASP competition decently. (I approximatly reached rank 1,500 for a protein )

More information on how it works and how it can contribute to curing diseases can be found here.