I wanted to highlight this BioTechniques article (yes, finally showing off something from BTN that I didn’t write lol) by Ariel Elghanayan about an new online video game for protein folding.
The online video game is called Foldit, and was developed by a group from the University of Washington. Recently debuted in a paper in Nature, the game challenges players to compete to manipulate the structure of proteins to create the most stable model. I thought it was an interesting way to make science more fun and approachable, but also to help people understand how proteins fold and re-fold, which is a topic that can be difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t have a science background.