Foldit

bkoep Staff Lv 1

September 17, 2018

Thanks to all the players that submitted designs for the Protein Design Partition Tournament! At the bottom of this post are the submissions that were selected for Phase Two of the tournament.

We’ve created 20 new Partition Puzzles for these selections, where the starting structure for each puzzle is the original design. Each partition puzzle has an RMSD objective, which requires all solutions to have RMSD > 2.5 Å relative to the starting structure. This means that players will have to significantly change the starting structure in order for scores to register. The starting solution is marked with secondary structure predictions from PSIPRED. In some cases the PSIPRED predictions do not agree with the designed structure, and might suggest ways that challengers can refold the starting structure. Remember, the tournament submissions will ultimately be evaluated by how well they withstand challenges, as measured by their partition functions.

These puzzles are available in the regular puzzle menu and anyone can play them! They are listed as “Expert” difficulty; the only reason for this is so they are sorted below other regular puzzles (since Foldit sorts the Puzzle Menu by difficulty), to reduce clutter for players who do not wish to participate. The puzzles will remain online for four weeks, and expire on 23:00 GMT October 15.

We do not expect everyone to play all 20 partition puzzles! These puzzles are all “voluntary”, for now, and each puzzle is worth zero points. However, as the tournament progresses, at least a couple of these puzzles will be re-released as regular puzzles (for points), to spur more challenges from the greater Foldit community. Sharing will be enabled in the re-released puzzles, so anyone who participates early in a partition puzzle will have a leg up if it is re-released later as a regular puzzle. We will also present new Achievements, at the end of the tournament, to those players that are most successful in challenging others’ designs.

We encourage all players to check out a couple partition puzzles below, and at least poke around with some of the designs you find most interesting. By playing the partition puzzles you reveal the energy landscapes of these proteins, which helps us determine whether the designs are likely to fold as intended. We also hope that, by playing these puzzles, players might be able to learn from the designs of others. What features of a protein design make it easy or difficult to challenge? This is something of an open question in protein design research, and we think Foldit players could provide some insight about this aspect of protein design.

Check out the partition puzzles, which are linked below!