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In a very roundabout fashion, I found myself credited as an author in a letter published by Nature yesterday. Alongside the named authors – Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popovic – was me. Well, the paper didn’t quite refer to me by name, but under the more general heading of Foldit players.

Like many others, I have been playing an online game called Foldit for the past few months. The basic goal of the game is to produce accurate protein structure models. Confirmed, but incorrectly folded protein structures are presented to players to work on, and through a friendly and colourful interface, players are able to manipulate the protein and produce an accurate protein structure model.

In their letter to Nature, Cooper et al. suggested that,

top ranked Foldit players excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in which substantial backbone rearrangements are necessary to achieve the burial of hydrophobic residues.

Humans use a much wider variety of methods than a computer would, and by working collaboratively, players were able to specialize on certain areas of the protein puzzle. The authors noted,

Some players specialize in early-stage openings, others in middle- and end-game polishing.

By working together on puzzles through sharing structures, instant messenger and wikis, teams were able to pull together a huge array of resources and generate algorithms that a computer would not think of.

I think this is a really interesting direction for scientific research, and as the authors note,

Scientific advancement is possible if even a small fraction of the energy that goes into playing computer games can be channelled into scientific discovery.

References: Nature, 2010. DOI: 10.1038/nature09304