Hi everyone! Please join the Foldit team for a science chat!
The Date: December 3, 2019 (Tuesday)
The location: #veteran, IRC (please comment if you have any questions about this).
The Time: 12:30 PM PST; 8:30 PM GMT
The Time Zone Converter: Here
We will be discussing the latest paper published and more!
Click here for the new paper
Maybe a little OT, but here goes.
It's probably been asked before, but will we ever see another exploration mode puzzle, or are they extinct?
How about sketchbook puzzles?
The new band to symmetry feature is nice, but will structure.GetDistance be updated to allow specifying a different chain? (For segmentIndex2 at least.)
Doing anything with bands seems super slow since a long while back. Turning off filters helps, but only a little. Can something be done internally to speed things up, band-wise?
The category scores on fold.it have been a mess for a while now. Group scores are a perennial problem. Several puzzles have failed to award points without poking and prodding. Is there hope for restoring data integrity?
Is there any plan to give us unsolved Cryo EDs ?
What is the limiting factor for Cryo ED ? The density measurement or the structure solving ?
(I would understand that players might be usefull for prediction only if a mass cryo measurement becomes available to feed a limited number of crystallographs).
Just wanted to add, we'd like to try for a more free-form chat this time! We will encourage players to jump in with questions during the chat, and hope for some good back-and-forth discussion with players.
In previous chats, we asked players to only post questions in advance, so that we might have some time to put together a clear response (science questions often require nuanced answers!). But we realized we were spending most of chat just copying and pasting pre-written answers, and there wasn't much real interaction between players and scientists.
We want to change that, so we'll be making more of an effort to address all of the spontaneous questions and follow-ups from players. It's still a good idea to post a question in advance, if you can—then we can be sure to give a thorough answer. But you should also join us for the live chat, in case you have more questions!
In science, an answered question always raises more questions!
Re. bcovs' high-throughput method, is this ability to test lots of proteins at once only applicable to a certain type/class of protein?
Sorry Loci! We didn't get to two of your questions during today's chat:
We should be able to update the LUA functions for getting the distance between different chains. Timo van der Laan has been a huge help maintaining and updating all of the LUA functions; maybe he will be able to help us with this as well!
The performance issue with bands is strange, and it sounds like a bug (I can't think of any reason why bands should slow things down). Hopefully we'll be able to track it down and fix soon!