Foldit Online Protein Puzzle

Inside your cells, proteins allow your body to break down food to power your muscles, send signals through your brain that control the body, and transport nutrients through your blood. Every protein consists of a long chain of joined-together amino acids, which are small molecules made up of atoms of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and hydrogen. Small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, whereas some human proteins are much larger, with thousands of amino acids.

Each type of protein folds up into a very specific shape, which specifies the protein's function. The Foldit exploration puzzle game attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of our puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins. Players can also design brand new proteins that could help prevent or treat important diseases.

Another objective of the project is to find new proteins that can help in turning plants into fuel. For this to happen plant material must be broken down (this is currently done by microbial enzymes—proteins—called "cellulases").

This game is a product of a collaboration between University of Washington Departments of Computer Science & Engineering and Biochemistry.

See more projects in Free,  Data Processing,  All Ages.

 

Antibodies online

Finding the right product for an experiment or assay development often takes a lot of time. We need to compare various catalogues, or, if we are lucky, we may use companies’ web sites. However, often it is difficult to compare products from different suppliers that are shown in different formats on separate web sites. Additionally, there are many medium sized and small suppliers of interesting products that are not known to a wide audience.
An interesting approach to solving these difficulties for various biochemical and molecular biological products is offered by a web site called antibodies-online.com.
The principle behind antibodies-online is to present one common marketplace for suppliers to offer their products. One may say antibodies-online aspires to be the Amazon of biochemical products, making the world’s supply of biological research reagents available to researchers internationally. Antibodies-online.com states that they offer more than 300,000 products from more than 120 suppliers. The products are available worldwide and include antibodies, as the name suggests, as well as ELISA kits, biochemical assays, chemicals, buffers, cell-culture supplies and much more besides.