Thread by @UWproteindesign

Today's an exciting day!

After many years of work, we're thrilled to report our latest advance in citizen science: nature.com/articles/s4158…

@Foldit @UWBiochemistry @uwcse @RutgersU @dartmouth @Northeastern @HHMINEWS #citizenscience #proteindesign @nature

Online citizen science projects have largely harnessed human pattern-recognition skills rather than human creativity. We wanted to go much further.

We posed the challenge of de novo protein design in the online protein-folding game @Foldit.

After many iterations of player design, analysis of the top-scoring solutions and subsequent game improvement, Foldit players can now—starting from an extended polypeptide chain—generate a diversity of protein structures and sequences that encode them in silico.

146 Foldit player designs were encoded in synthetic genes; 56 expressed solubly in E coli & adopted stable monomers. We obtained high res structures for 4 of the designs, which were nearly identical to the models.

The diversity of structures produced by @Foldit players is unprecedented, representing 20 different folds—including a new fold not observed in natural proteins.

Several players are co-authors of this study.

We are so grateful for (and impressed by) the sustained enthusiasm of our Foldit players.

We look forward to challenging them with some of the most difficult and important protein design challenges going forward, including the design of new medicines and biodegradable materials.

Anyone can play Foldit for free at: fold.it

If you're already a professional academic scientist looking for a power protein design interface, please explore: fold.it/dist/external/…