Digital Parasite
10-31-2006, 01:59 PM
Not much action in this forum lately so I thought I would post some info that people might have missed from David Baker's journal (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=1177#29373).
You will have seen by now on your screensavers the addition of the protein sidechains during the "fullatom relax" stage of the simulations. This gives you a more complete picture of the "3 dimensional jigsaw" nature of the protein folding problem, where the challenge can be viewed as getting all the pieces of the puzzle to fit together perfectly with no holes.
Our dream now is to make rosetta@home interactive, so you can move the chain around if you see a possible way to solve the puzzle. we are talking with colleagues in the CS department here who are experts on video games about how to approach this. eventually you could imagine designing proteins to cure diseases for fun and relaxation--I think it is possible that it could be made as engaging as a standard computer game. (we haven't thought about the ramifications for credits, but if you can guide the simulation yourself, you should get a higher score for finding lower energy solutions ... . but we won't have to cross this bridge for quite a while!).
and a response to a question about it:
all of the work units we would send out would keep the part that would be important for curing the disease constant but the other parts would be variable. this is what we are doing now, your computers are exploring different possibilities for the variable regions. if we can go interactive, you would help your computer explore the different possiblities. we would rank all the solutions that each of you return by their energies, and then experimentally test the lowest energy solutions.
now, suppose that you designed a protein and it turned into a blockbuster drug--maybe you should get some fraction of the royalties? thus far all income from licensing rosetta to companies has gone straight back into research and development and I want this to continue, but the double incentive of contributing both to global health and possibly getting some money back could make this vision of an interactive multiplayer rosetta "game" quite popular globally which would be great for human health and research (and who knows, there could be a 13 year old in Nepal who turns out to be a whiz at designing proteins!). but I should emphasize that this is still more fantasy than reality right now.
A video-game version would be pretty interesting I think it if could actually produce good results.
You will have seen by now on your screensavers the addition of the protein sidechains during the "fullatom relax" stage of the simulations. This gives you a more complete picture of the "3 dimensional jigsaw" nature of the protein folding problem, where the challenge can be viewed as getting all the pieces of the puzzle to fit together perfectly with no holes.
Our dream now is to make rosetta@home interactive, so you can move the chain around if you see a possible way to solve the puzzle. we are talking with colleagues in the CS department here who are experts on video games about how to approach this. eventually you could imagine designing proteins to cure diseases for fun and relaxation--I think it is possible that it could be made as engaging as a standard computer game. (we haven't thought about the ramifications for credits, but if you can guide the simulation yourself, you should get a higher score for finding lower energy solutions ... . but we won't have to cross this bridge for quite a while!).
and a response to a question about it:
all of the work units we would send out would keep the part that would be important for curing the disease constant but the other parts would be variable. this is what we are doing now, your computers are exploring different possibilities for the variable regions. if we can go interactive, you would help your computer explore the different possiblities. we would rank all the solutions that each of you return by their energies, and then experimentally test the lowest energy solutions.
now, suppose that you designed a protein and it turned into a blockbuster drug--maybe you should get some fraction of the royalties? thus far all income from licensing rosetta to companies has gone straight back into research and development and I want this to continue, but the double incentive of contributing both to global health and possibly getting some money back could make this vision of an interactive multiplayer rosetta "game" quite popular globally which would be great for human health and research (and who knows, there could be a 13 year old in Nepal who turns out to be a whiz at designing proteins!). but I should emphasize that this is still more fantasy than reality right now.
A video-game version would be pretty interesting I think it if could actually produce good results.