Most of us associate gaming with mindless entertainment, which involves shooting down aliens, battling villains, or speeding down a race track. Foldit, an online 3D jigsaw puzzle, which was developed by the University of Washington, is game that allows scientists to understand the 3D structure of proteins. Because computers have limited spatial reasoning capabilities, scientists are recruiting anyone willing to play the game to help them understand the structure of proteins. If scientists have a firm grasp on what a particular protein looks like, they can make new treatments and prevent disease. Just recently Foldit’s gamers figured out the structure of a protein present in the AIDS virus, a structure which scientists could not figure out for over a decade!

Anyone who has taken a biology course knows that “proteins are the building block of life”. Scientists already know the sequences of amino acids that make up the proteins. What they don’t know is how they are folded, how they actually look like in the real world. Proteins fold based on the lowest energy expenditure and because there are so many possible combinations of a protein to fold, finding out that lowest energy expenditure is hard to do with computers alone. Computers are limited in their ability predict the 3D structure of proteins because they rely on a set of predetermined rules, which limit their ability to be creative. That creativity is exactly what is needed to figuring out protein shapes because they can bend, twist, and curl into extremely odd shapes. Most of the gamers of Foldit have no scientific background and the gamers with the highest scores use nothing but their own intuition, spatial reasoning, and persistence, which, with a little luck, can help scientists solve enormous problems.