New & different Flu Design Puzzle

[beta_helix]

Today we are posting a Flu Puzzle that is very different than previous design puzzles.

The motivation for this puzzle is something we normally have computers do called 'hot spot hashing'. This is a method to dock disembodied amino acids on the surface of a target protein with goal of finding some orientations/residues that score really well. We then take the different clusters and try to find a scaffold protein that can connect residues from each cluster.

It's basically like trying to find a hold on a wall by finding out first good holes to put your fingers into. Our computers normally just randomly dock the amino acids and we expect that with lots of tries eventually we'll find a good contact.

However, this method is often computationally intensive and we want to see if you are able to use your Foldit expertise to just look at the protein and find the best spots.

Please feel free to post any questions in the puzzle comments for 532: Beginner Flu Puzzle: http://fold.it/portal/node/992184

[beta_helix]

Some of the top players posted their top scoring solutions here:
http://foldit.wikia.com/wiki/Puzzle_532

The reason I asked not to share them is that we'd like as much diversity as possible.
If everyone comes up with the same 5 top-scoring models, that doesn't give us as many conformations to test in the lab.
Ideally, all the top 100 solutions will be completely different… but sadly with this puzzle it wasn't the case (many groups converged to the exact same solution for their top-scoring prediction).

That is still very useful, but I hope it makes sense that if they all came up with alternative solutions that would be even more useful!