Can gamers solve flu epidemics?
FoldIt, the protein forming game, has been a huge success. In this video, HealthMaker Seth Cooper shares some exciting new spin off ideas that could help scientist in labs, including a new approach to dealing with the flu.
Transcript
The scientists are actually interested in creating proteins that have some new function that they're interested in.
And they can pose these problems to the players. And the players can use the tools in the game to actually design a hypothetical protein.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
One of the really exciting new things that we're working on with Foldit and have recently seen some good success with is actually letting the players design entirely
new synthetic proteins that don't actually exist yet in nature. And so the scientists are actually interested in creating proteins that have some new function
that they're interested in. And they can pose these problems to the players. And the players can use the tools in the game to actually design a hypothetical protein.
And the scientists can then actually take that out of the game and synthesize it in the lab with laboratory experiments, and see if it folds up, and see if it actually
has the effect that they're looking for. And we just recently had a series of puzzles based on designing an enzyme where
the players and the scientists went back and forth with several rounds of the players making proteins in the game, and the scientists testing them out
in the lab. And we ended up with an enzyme that's actually several times more efficient than the ones that the scientists started out with.
And so we're looking at using the same process for designing new things like inhibitors for the flu virus. [AUDIO LOGO]
cold flu
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