beta_helix Staff Lv 1
CASP 9 is going to start on May 3rd, and we are very excited that this year Foldit will be its own CASP structure prediction group. Unlike CASP 8 where Foldit submissions were part of the Baker Team, this summer all of you will be part of 'The Foldit Team' competing against structure prediction labs from around the world.
As you might already know, CASP lets you submit 5 models for each target, so we have been trying to think of cool ways to let YOU, the Foldit players, pick these models (other than the top scoring Foldit solution which we plan to submit as one of the 5 submissions).
Today we are trying a new puzzle type where you get to vote for what you believe is the best model. In these "Solution Voting" puzzles, you will be given different high-scoring Foldit solutions from a previous puzzle. In today's case you have 5 Foldit submissions from puzzle 266: Mini-CASP 17.
You can look at each solution in gallery mode, rotating them around and comparing one solution to another using the guide, and then vote for the model you believe is better. You can show clashes, voids, exposed residues, bonds, and sidechains, but there is no score information given so you can't just vote for the one with the best Foldit score. All of these models are already very good-scoring Foldit solutions, and we're interested to see if you can pick out good models based on your own ideas of what proteins should look like.
Once the native structures are released, we will let you know which model was the closest to the native and will assign you points based on how close your vote was to the native. We haven't worked out all the details for that part yet, but the more "Solution Voting" puzzles you participate in and the more often you
vote correctly, the higher your Foldit rating will be. The skills necessary to rank good models might be a Foldit skill that we haven't measured before. As such, we might have to come up with a new ranking category:
Prognosticator
Visionary
Medium
Prophesier
We will test this out before CASP 9 begins, and if it seems to work well, Foldit might be able to participate in one of the other CASP categories: Quality assessment of models (http://www.predictioncenter.org/casp9/index.cgi#scope), where the CASP organizers give us a bunch of predictions and we have to rank them (which do we think is closest to the native). This could also be a very exciting category for Foldit players as well!
For now, please try out the new 266: Mini-CASP 17 - Solution Voting puzzle. We picked 5 different Foldit predictions from puzzle 266 for you to look at. For this first puzzle we expect to get the answer very soon, perhaps even this week. We don't know what the native looks like either, but since you've been working very hard on Mini-CASP 17 we hope you all might be able to make an educated guess!