Foldit - Gamers Will Help Defeat the Coronavirus
The University of Washington wants to take advantage of the support of gamers in the fight against the novel coronavirus. To this end, scientists have released a new challenge in Foldit, which can help to find a way to neutralize the disease.
- Researchers from the University of Washington have released a new challenge in the free game Foldit, associated with the coronavirus;
- The players' task is to find a way to neutralize the "crown" responsible for binding the virus to human cells;
- The highest-scoring projects will be analysed by researchers and may help in the fight against the disease.
Coronavirus - that's a word we've been hearing all year round. In less than four months we have moved from the first and distant cases in China to an outbreak in the US and Europe. In the meantime, COVID-19 has made a lot of waves on the web, which even players could feel. If you're one of the people who are annoyed by the next cancelled or impoverished events, you might be interested in the action launched by University of Washington. Seattle's scientists encourage us to take on a new challenge in the free game Foldit, which can help control the coronavirus epidemic.
Sounds ridiculous? Perhaps at first. Foldit is a free production created in 2008 by Seth Cooper and Adrien Treuille as an experiment. The aim of the game is to twist a protein structure using the available tools to achieve a specific effect. It should be noted that this is not only an educational game - the highest scored configurations are analysed by scientists to see if they can be applied in reality. In this way, in 2012, players helped to decipher the structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, which remains probably the greatest (though not the only) achievement of the community focused around Foldit.
In the case of coronavirus, the aim is to neutralize the pointed crown structure (to which the virus owes its name), which is responsible for binding it to human cells. Players can either create their own protein or modify the default configuration. The University of Washington announced that it will test the most promising projects and even produce them in a laboratory environment. Of course, this will require long tests to learn the effects of these proteins on the human body. If you want to try your hand at fighting COVID-19, just go to Foldit's official website, download the game and find the puzzle number 1805b.
