Hey all,
I’m curious about the real-world impact of Foldit. Has the community actually helped solve important protein structures or contributed to breakthroughs?
If anyone knows about notable discoveries or published research involving Foldit players, please share!
Foldit players helped solve the Mason-Pfizer Monkey Virus early on. That put Foldit on the map.
Foldit had a long run of protein design puzzles. At least five proteins designed by Foldit players have been created in the lab and then solved by X-ray crystallography. The solved Foldit designs lists the proteins and links to their PDB entries. See Foldit protein design paper for the paper that covered most of these results.
Sadly, protein design puzzles ended a few years ago, as AI-based designs took over.
Foldit has an ongoing series of electron density reconstruction puzzles, where players try to improve on published solutions. Foldit results are submitted to the PDB-REDO project, where they compete with automated methods that try to do the same thing. At last check, there were over 70 Foldit entries in the PDB-REDO database, see PDB-REDO Foldit results for the current status.
Other contributions include an improved Diels-Alderase enzyme (which needs a wiki page) and some promising work on spider toxins.
See Foldit publication for more Foldit-related papers. (The list may be slightly out of date, and the format is a little unwieldy, since it lists all authors….)