I recently read online about how video games are considered to be a key to modern science. As you may not have known, many video gamers spend more than 9,000 hours by the age of 21 shooting aliens, playing battle games with fictitious monsters, you name it. Computer scientist Adrien Treuille, who created EteRNA and Foldit wants to make non-exciting scientific mysteries such as "protein folding" to be really challenging and fun for gamers in this world. Based on impressive results from Foldit and EteRNA, about 430,000 of their players in total have made and continue to make new discoveries that have eluded scientists along with their supercomputers.
An example of a discovery made by those players from Foldit figured out a certain puzzle about proteins that benefits further research into HIV/AIDS. This was literally huge and all of their work made it into an international journal called, "Nature." Very fascinating! Proteins are basically the building blocks of life and once scientists gain a much better understanding of the protein's shapes, new ways of treatment and disease prevention might be created.
Many of those gamers teach computers and scientists how to build by using genetic code. They do so by altering the RNA's shapes and proteins in order to see which one will work the very best. For those who are in Foldit, they are awarded points based on building proteins that eat up very little energy. In EteRNA, a picture of the sequences in the game will be made by a Stanford lab.
Let us hope that many more new discoveries will continue being made and see how much of an impact it will have in this world.
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