Foldit Puzzles

1501: Revisiting Puzzle 58: Insulin Mutant

This is a throwback puzzle to the early days of Foldit. These are the two chains of a bio-engineered variant of human insulin, which contains six cysteine residues that oxidize to form three disulfide bonds. We are revisiting old Foldit puzzles so we can see how useful the recent additions to the game have been.

1499: Symmetric Dimer Design: Hydrogen Bond Networks

This symmetric design puzzle has C2 symmetry, with two symmetric chains. The H-bond Network Filter encourages players to bury satisfied H-bond networks at the interface between the two chains. There are several other filters in effect; see the puzzle comments for details. The Baker Lab will run folding predictions on your solutions for this puzzle, and those that perform well will be synthesized in the lab. Remember, you can use the Upload for Scientists button for up to 5 designs that you want us to look at, even if they are not the best-scoring solutions!

1499b: Symmetric Dimer Design: Hydrogen Bond Networks

Note: This puzzle replaces Puzzle 1499 which was posted with a problematic filter. Players may load in solutions from Puzzle 1499.

1499c: Symmetric Dimer Design: Hydrogen Bond Networks

Note: This puzzle replaces Puzzle 1499 which was posted with a problematic filter. Players may load in solutions from Puzzle 1499.

1498: Revisiting Puzzle 57: Beta-Neurotoxin

This is a throwback puzzle to the early days of Foldit. This scorpion toxin is similar to the one from Puzzle 55, and binds to voltage-gated ion channels of insects. The protein contains eight cysteine residues that oxidize to form four disulfide bonds. We are revisiting old Foldit puzzles so we can see how useful the recent additions to the game have been.

1497: Aflatoxin Challenge: Round 5

The aflatoxin puzzles are back! This puzzle is very similar to Puzzle 1440: Aflatoxin Challenge: Round 1, but parts of the scaffold protein have been trimmed to reduce the size of the puzzle, and we've upweighted ligand interactions by a factor of five. We'd like to see if Foldit players can design proteins that make more interactions with the ligand! See the blog for more details. Unfortunately, due to the scaffold trimming and the recent Foldit update, players will not be able to load solutions from Puzzle 1440.

1496: Primitive 80 Residue Monomer Design

This is another "primitive" style design puzzle, meaning that we've disabled most of the filters normally used for Foldit protein design. This puzzle debuts a brand new, state-of-the-art score function that has shown improved accuracy in some protein modeling benchmarks. We're curious to see if this score function also improves design accuracy in Foldit. What's the best scoring design you can come up with using the new score function?

1495: Revisiting Puzzle 55: Scorpion Toxin

This is a throwback puzzle to the early days of Foldit. This scorpion toxin binds to voltage-gated ion channels in insects, resulting in full-body paralysis. The protein contains eight cysteine residues that oxidize to form four disulfide bonds. We are revisiting old Foldit puzzles so we can see how useful the recent additions to the game have been.

1492: Revisiting Puzzle 54: Human Fyn

This is a throwback puzzle to the early days of Foldit. This kinase protein is part of a human signaling pathway that controls cell growth. We are revisiting old Foldit puzzles so we can see how useful the recent additions to the game have been.

1493: Primitive 70 Residue Monomer Design: CoreExists

This is another "primitive" style puzzle, in which we've disabled most of the filters normally used for Foldit protein design. The only filter in this puzzle is the CoreExists filter. Foldit has changed a great deal since we ran the first Foldit design puzzle, back in August of 2009, and the results of recent design puzzles have shown that Foldit players are now perfectly capable of designing well-folded, stable proteins. We'd like to write up a paper about these results, and it will be important to have a clear picture of what happens without those special tools and filters now used for protein design. For this puzzle, we're asking Foldit players to forget everything you've learned about protein design! This puzzle uses only a basic Rosetta scoring function, and we do not expect top-scoring designs to be realistic. But we're very curious whether Foldit players will find the same solutions as back in 2009. What is the best-scoring structure you can fold, with only the CoreExists filter?