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charsb1973 Lv 1
How mutch do we need to solve this problem ?
Beginner Puzzle: Coronavirus
Closed since 6 months ago
BeginnerSummary
- Created
- August 07, 2025
- Expires
- Max points
- 100
Design a protein binder against coronavirus! The starting structure shows how the coronavirus spike protein binds to a human receptor protein. The coronavirus protein (in gray) is mostly frozen, except for the orange and blue sidechains at the binding site. The binding site of coronavirus sticks to the human protein (in color), and this allows the coronavirus to infect human cells. We want to design a new protein that can bind to coronavirus more tightly than the human protein! A tight binder could block the normal coronavirus-human interaction, and might be used as an antiviral drug against coronavirus! Refold and mutate the starting structure to increase your score and improve binding against coronavirus! This is a Beginner puzzle for new players that have joined Foldit in the last 6 months.
Top groups
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100 pts. 13,176
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Comments
LociOiling Lv 1
These puzzles are different than the campaign puzzles, since they don't have a set solution. The only thing that matters is your score when the puzzle ends. That gets you the rank you see on this page, and you'll also receive up to 100 "global points", which stick around for a while. The global points determine your overall rank across puzzles and players.
I just happened to look at the last coronavirus beginner puzzle, which a lot of people opened. At least 100 have opened this one so far.
I see charsb1973 has made good progress. For anyone just starting, try shake and wiggle. That's pretty much guaranteed move you out of a tie for last place. Many of those 100 players show a score of 11,753, which I'm guessing means they opened the puzzle and just looked at it.
LociOiling Lv 1
Mr_Dogo_ (aka Aarav_Awasthi) asked an interesting question over in global chat, triggering a longish response from me. A slightly cleaned-up transcript appears below.
Mr_Dogo_ — me and @zxspectrum going back and forth on Easy Mini Freestyle
Also, can anyone help me out with the general foldit strategy? I'm not sure I quite understand how I should approach the beginner covid puzzle. I have just been using random recipes, and while it is working, I want to understand the strategies behind how to be successful
LociOiling — the beginner coronavirus puzzle is a protein design puzzle, so the tools are a little different than any of the current science puzzles.
With the coronavirus puzzle, you get to mutate in addition to the regular protein tools.
My suggestion is to always start on low wiggle power, and to do things like mutate, remix, and rebuild on low.
Some players also set clashing importance to less than 1.0 in the early phase.
You have to be sure your recipe will honor the clashing importance you set. Some recipes just set the CI to specific values, others use the initial CI to scale the values they'd use.
You'll eventually want to move back to CI 1.0, but especially with the long-running beginner puzzles, you can wait a while.
I think the coronavirus puzzle has three kinds of mutate:
- one where you pick a specific amino acid for one or more selected segments
- one where it mutates all the selected segments, picking the best amino acid for each based on its own internal logic
- one just like that last one, except it uses a "neural net" algorithm to pick the amino acids (it's much quicker)
There are various recipes with names like "Mutate Combo" or "Mutate No Wiggle", specializing in mutation.
Mutation is still build into many recipes, like TvdL enhanced DRW and TvdL DRemixW.
Many other recipes use mutate in different ways, such as mutating instead of shaking, usually as an option.
I don't think many recipes got around to implementing neural net mutate, but there are function calls for it. Neural net mutate came along, but then soon after, protein design puzzles stopped.
After a while on low wiggle power, try switching to medium or high wiggle power (not all puzzles offer high; the coronavirus puzzle allows only medium).
Just shaking and wiggling on medium or high should find points.
Something like a Quake or GAB recipe may also be good.
Then later, something like Microidealize or Cut and Wiggle.
Then usually a local wiggle recipe toward the end. Banded Worm Pairs IF is a good one
There are lots of versions of most of these recipes, different strokes and all that. For any recipes without a link, you'll have to do a little searching.