Seth Cooper Staff Lv 1
Today, we'll begin a set of trials of a new kind of puzzle and several of these will be truly blind tests. We'll only find out the answer in the fall, as part of the "CASP" competition!
These are cases where the starting model we give you takes advantage of structural information available for some close cousins. For example, we might be trying to solve the version of an enzyme in the Cholera bacteria, and we know the structure of the version in the E. Coli bacteria. In your puzzles, we'll have "constraints". These will be like preset rubber bands that will penalize really large movements of the constrained parts of the protein – they will show as red lines as they start to impact your score. Also, as a visual aid, parts of the protein that are really constrained will have darker – almost black – backbones. These sound like incredibly easy problems because of all the constraints – but this puzzle of high resolution refinement of starting structures has turned out to be surprisingly hard. Help us get closer to this Holy Grail of structure modeling!
You can take advantage of locking and the pie menu options to focus on any unconstrained areas!