You can play games to help scientists find the cure for Covid-19

The World Health Organization has now formally considered Covid-19 a global pandemic. The new strain of corona virus, called SARS-CoV-2, has now spread to more than 100 countries, infecting over 174,000 and killing more than 7,000 of them.

The concern is that we do not yet have the treatment for Covid-19, as well as any vaccine that can be deployed on a large scale. There have been some drug and vaccine trials on small groups, but the result is something we still have to wait.

So do you want to help scientists in their work, specifically find a drug or vaccine for the disease?

The truth is that not everyone can volunteer to go to the lab to do errands for scientists, but with just a computer and a stable internet connection, you can still contribute some work. efforts in finding drugs to treat Covid-19.

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Foldit, an online game that allows internet users to fold protein structures into a shape, where they remain stable. This is the goal of protein designs for biomedical research, and is also the challenge Foldit poses to players.

During the Covid-19 plague, Foldit released a new special edition for its game, a new door to conquer. They want players to fold a protein structure that can be used against corona virus.

" The corona virus has spikes of protein growing out of the surface, which it uses to identify human cells ," said Brian Koepnick, a biochemist at the Protein Design Institute at the University of Washington.

Koepnick is a veteran " Fold" player . He even considered it to be his research tool for six years.

" Foldit players are designing new protein drugs that can stick to the spikes of the Covid virus, making it unrecognizable to human cells. This could prevent the virus from infecting more cells, even if someone has been exposed to the disease ".

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First released in 2008, Foldit was originally a pilot research project of the Center for Game Sciences, University of Washington. The game has gone through many previous versions of the puzzle, meaning that players have helped scientists solve hundreds of problems involving proteins.

The latest version you can download on their website Foldit is now called "1811: Coronavirus Binder Design: Round 3" . In it, players are "challenged to design an anti-virus protein that can bind corona virus and break its infection process".

" This puzzle provides a spiral that is known for its ability to stick to corona viruses. Foldit players can design a new protein containing this spiral. You should focus on building a protein. has a large core, orange hydrophobic, "the game introduction said.

Koepnick explains Foldit's scoring rule, which says, "You will change the shape of the protein model to optimize your score. This score is really a complex calculation that represents the potential of pleats ".

The function to calculate it is identical to the function that Koepnick and other scientists are using in their real scientific research.

Foldit's riddle regarding the corona virus is set up so that high-score models will create better adhesion to the protein spikes of the virus strain. Scientists can look at the results of the highest-scoring players, to design a potential protein used as a real-life Covid-19 drug.

At the time when Foldit's new puzzle was released, more than 500,000 accounts were involved in the game. More than 2,500 people have embarked on conquering new doors.

Seth Cooper, the game's chief designer, who is currently an associate professor at Northeastern Khoury University of Computer Science, said: `` Foldit was created because his design team thought humans could take out better computer solutions. Every player can interact well with the 3D structures of proteins and they understand how they work.

Previously, Foldit players helped scientists get more protein designs to successfully synthesize. For example, a player helped find a Mason-Pfizer monkey-stopping protein in 2011.

"I find it very interesting that my game can help solve diseases like this. And that was the original goal we had hoped for when we first designed the game , " Cooper said.

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What's even more interesting is that some of the very good players on Foldit actually have no biochemistry background. They simply approach the protein folds under the eyes of an ordinary person who loves beauty.

But surprisingly, this approach sometimes proved very effective. Some players help scientists solve their problems on Foldit, and have also been named co-authors in scientific papers published in prestigious journals.

According to Cooper, the project to build solutions-oriented communities like this is a way to bring video games towards a good, valuable purpose in real life. When people play games, they are actually using their intelligence to solve problems. So it's great to harness that intelligence to solve real-world problems.

Refer to Fastcompany