Gamers decipher a years old AIDS mystery

It now seems that it's no longer a requirement to have a Ph.D in order to accomplish a major scientific breakthrough, you just need to be good at video games.

In an unprecedented feat, gamers used an online video game called Foldit to unravel the mystery of a key protein in the development of AIDS that's baffled scientists for more than a decade. The goal was to successfully create a 3D image of the structure of a retroviral protease, an enzyme from an AIDS-like virus that plays a key role in how it spreads.

Scientists fruitlessly wrestled with this problem for years, and in a Hail Mary play, gave groups of Foldit users three weeks to fashion an accurate model. After the allotted time, researchers compared the best submissions to the enzyme's crystallographic X-ray and found that one of the teams correctly created its structure in just 10 days.

Studying every angle of a protein via a 3D image is vital for Pharmacologists in understanding diseases and developing drugs to combat them. Constructing these representations is what Foldit's for.

Created in 2008 by University of Washington researchers, Foldit uses a video game-like setting and provides players with a set of online tools to compete with each other at decoding complex amino acid chains, which make up proteins. More stable structures are awarded higher points. The community has grown to more than 236,000 players since it started, and many of the gamers involved with the experiment had no background in biochemistry at all.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Fold.it's lead designer and developer Seth Cooper said in a press release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans."

The weekly journal, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, published these findings in its Sept. 18 issue, lauding the players and researchers for their efforts.

The war on AIDS isn't over yet, but if gamers could crack an AIDS puzzle in less than three weeks, then give them about three months and we'll have warp drive and interstellar travel.