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Introducing Foldit Education Mode

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology volume 27, pages 769–770 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — In its twelve years online, Foldit has become a frequently used teaching tool for biochemistry at the college level, despite not providing premade content specifically for education. Here we introduce Foldit Education Mode, in which students proceed through a self-guided tutorial of standard concepts in protein biochemistry via a series of interactive three-dimensional biochemistry puzzles. Education Mode could be used independently or as a central component of a science class. With many classrooms staying in remote mode this autumn, Foldit Education Mode offers a unique and free online option for classes worldwide and is available for download at our new educator’s page: https://fold.it/educator.

Foldit is a free citizen science biochemistry computer game1. In the most basic Foldit puzzles, players try to fold a protein into its proper three-dimensional structure, starting from an unfolded peptide. The players’ structures are immediately scored using the Rosetta force field2, with the players collaborating and competing to attain the best-scoring protein structure. The concept is that, if hundreds or thousands of players all work to create a protein structure, there is a higher chance that one of them may find the correct fold.

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Fig. 1: Foldit Education Mode.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Kimberly Cortes, Ashley Vater and Irina Makarevitch for their prerelease input and Jeff Flatten, Zoran Popović, Henry Solberg, Rocco Moretti, David Baker and Jens Meiler for aid with Foldit support. This work was supported by NIH R00 GM120388.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Josh Aaron Miller & Seth Cooper

  2. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dartmouth, MA, USA

    Firas Khatib

  3. Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and the Knoebel Institute for Healthy Aging, University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Haley Hammond & Scott Horowitz

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  1. Josh Aaron Miller
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  2. Firas Khatib
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  3. Haley Hammond
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  4. Seth Cooper
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Correspondence to Scott Horowitz.

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Miller, J.A., Khatib, F., Hammond, H. et al. Introducing Foldit Education Mode. Nat Struct Mol Biol 27, 769–770 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41594-020-0485-6

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