horowsah Staff Lv 1
We just posted the pre-preprint of the paper describing Foldit players’ successes on the Reconstruction puzzle series. You can find it at: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.19.599674v2. It will hopefully be going out for peer review for publication shortly.
The main findings in this paper have been shared with Foldit players before, but to recap, Foldit players have done a fantastic job on this puzzle series of improving structural models that can be found in the Protein Data Bank using the original experimental data in electron density puzzles. In most cases, the top solution from Foldit players was a substantial improvement over the previous version. Usually, this came primarily from the geometry and steric clashes being considerably improved over the original, but sometimes the fit to data was better as well.
We’ve collaborated with the PDB-REDO server to host these new and better solutions from Foldit players so that they can benefit the whole scientific community. apetrides has recently created an automated pipeline for solution analysis to enable this as we continue the Reconstruction series into the future.
Of potentially greater interest to Foldit players than many others who might read this article, you might want to check out the Supplemental Material at the end in which several Foldit players described their overall strategies to Reconstruction puzzles, which vary quite a bit.
As always, thank you for your contributions to Foldit, and congratulations!
