This the Phase One design puzzle for the Protein Design Partition Tournament! Players have two weeks to craft their best protein design, which will have to defend itself in Phase Two of the tournament. For players who do not wish to participate in the tournament, this puzzle will also behave like a normal Foldit puzzle, and points will be awarded to top-ranking players and teams as usual. Players may use 70-100 residues, at a cost of 32 points per residue; and designs with more than 10% helices will be penalized 10 points per extra residue in a helix.
To submit a design for the tournament, players must save their chosen solution with the title "Tournament Submission" and share the solution with scientists using the Upload for Scientists button in the Save Solution menu. Only soloist solutions will be accepted as tournament submissions. See the blog for tournament details.
Residue Count: Normalizes for extra residues inserted beyond the starting 70, at a cost of 32 points per residue. Players may use up to 100 residues in total.
Secondary Structure: Only 10% of residues may form helices. Additional helices will incur a penalty of 10 points per residue.
To make sure your solutions have sequences that can't easily be
rebuilt as helices, it may help to include tryptophan, tyrosine, phenylalanine, isoleucine, valine, and threonine residues that
says prefer to adopt β-strand conformations. It may also help
to include glycine and proline (helix-breaker) residues and to
avoid the helix-favoring MALEK (methionine, alanine, leucine,
glutamate, and lysine) residues. Another idea is to use
sequences that alternate between hydrophilic and hydrophobic
residues, as often occurs in sheets, rather than other patterns
that often occur in helices.
Each player may submit only one design for the tournament. If a player submits multiple solutions with the title "Tournament Submission", then only the most recent submission will be considered for Phase Two of the tournament. The reason for this is to make sure everyone has an equal chance in the Phase Two selections.
However, we still want to see your designs! If you develop several designs that you like, please share them all with us using the Upload for Scientist button! Even though we will only consider one submission for the tournament, we will still run our regular analysis on all designs from this puzzle. We always look at the scientist-shares in design puzzles, and it's especially helpful if you can save them with an informative title and description!