Online Gamers Achieve First Crowd-Sourced Redesign of Protein

Next up will be a more useful target--potent versions of small protein inhibitors that bind to and block the 1918 pandemic influenza virus

The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations.

The researchers have previously reported successes by Foldit players in folding proteins, but the latest work moves into the realm of protein design, a more open-ended problem. By posing a series of puzzles to Foldit players and then testing variations on the players' best designs in the lab, researchers have created an enzyme with more than 18-fold higher activity than the original. The work was published January 22 in Nature Biotechnology.

This is a cruise I'd love to take.

Although the process of cremation and the Bios Urn may not be favored by all, if there is a zombie apocalypse somewhere in our future, we would much rather be trees than zombies.

Not if this was the case...