When you’ve got a problem that ten years of trying has failed to solve, it’s time to consider another approach. So recently, when scientists at the University of Washington Department of Biochemistry, led by Dr. Firas Khatib (a featured Gnomedex speaker a few years back), failed to configure the structure of a retrovirus enzyme even after a decade of trying, they decided to enlist help from an unlikely source: gamers.
“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” says Dr. Khatib.
Says researcher Dr. Seth Cooper: “People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at. Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week’s paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before.”
In only three weeks, this experiment paid off in ways where a decade of more traditional approaches had failed. Gamers were able to generate models that were close enough for the trained eyes of researchers to refine and discover the enzyme’s structure and discern vulnerabilities on the molecule that would make ideal targets for deactivation by drugs designed to knock it out. This could give us a vast new arsenal in the war against AIDS and other retroviral conditions.
The team’s findings are summed up in its paper, Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players, published in the September 18th edition of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
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