Recently we posted about Folding@Home Project that leverages the unused processing power of your desktop computer to carry out some calculations needed for medical research. Now there is another project called Foldit that can also do something similar. Foldit, designed by the University of Washington, runs on your system and shows you various puzzles. These puzzles are about helical RNA structures and you have to modify the structures to avoid any possible conflicts.
Foldit is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. As the title suggests, the Foldit project is used for RNA folding related calculations. RNA folding is the process by which a linear RNA molecule is changed by folding it with a particular protein. The process is often used to find vaccines for viral infections.
After you have installed Foldit on your computer, you have to create an account to access all the puzzles offered by Foldit. As already mentioned, all the puzzles are related to the RNA molecules and how we can safely attach another protein to fold it. For the beginners, some very easy puzzles are shown and the difficulty level of these puzzles keeps going up with the puzzle levels.
In order to play these puzzles, you can use your mouse to drag the RNA structures. There are many actions available like shaking or wiggling using which you can automate the process. But you can also use the manual way of sizing, spacing or moving the RNA molecules to solves the puzzles.
While you are forced to live under a lockdown or quarantine, you can enjoy playing Foldit puzzles and at the same time share your computer’s processing power with the medical research related to finding a possible vaccine for the viral infections that are going around all over the world.
You can download Foldit from https://fold.it/.