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Foldit is an online citizen-science game originally started back in 2007 to tackle protein folding, one of the hardest problems in computational biology. The idea was to use human intuition to bypass the limitations of computer algorithms. In addition to figuring out protein structures, Foldit players have also designed new synthetic proteins, and are now designing new small molecules that bind to proteins.

You don't need to know anything about biology to play Foldit, but a little background will help. Most Foldit players are not biologists. Read about The Science Behind Foldit.

David Baker wins Nobel Prize

Nobel

The Chemistry laureates give Foldit a shout-out.

Dr. David Baker shared the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper of DeepMind. Among his other accomplishments, Dr. Baker was one of the founders of Foldit, as noted in an article on the University of Washington website.

See the 2024 Nobel Prize Award Ceremony on YouTube, or read the transcript, provided by Foldit player Serca.

A video from Quanta magazine mentions Foldit at the 12 minute mark. A related article gives more detail. Thanks to beta_helix for providing these links in a Foldit blog post Foldit blog post.


New Players

Visit fold.it (the official Foldit site) to download the game and get started. Foldit runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. See Download-Install-Troubleshoot for install instructions. Post to the bugs forum if you're having trouble getting the game installed.

The Campaign shows you the tools, try them before trying a science puzzle. (deutsch) | (svenska)

The video QUICK Foldit Tutorial Walkthrough from S0ckrates shows the fast path through the intro puzzles.

See Get Started Playing Foldit for more background.

Foldit's Education puzzles introduce the game, much like the Campaign, but focus more on the biochemistry aspects.

Please read the Foldit Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. Please also see the Rules of the Foldit wiki.

What's folding

Updates

  • toxin shockin': an office hour with UC Davis scientists touched on the recent spider toxin puzzles, as described in the blog post Foldit Players Help Model a Spider Toxin for Pain Therapy.
  • uploads/downloads: the latest devprev release fixes some of the issues with uploading and downloading solutions in Open/Share Solutions.
  • start the presses: the paper Drugit: crowd-sourcing molecular design of non-peptidic VHL binders has just been published in Nature Communications. Congratulations to Foldit player Nicm25, who gets prominent mention in the text. See also a thank-you from Sciren, and a thread involving an interesting email that Bruno Kestemont received back in March.
  • PDB-REDO redux: the electron density reconstruction and refinement puzzles have been feeding the PDB-REDO archive. So far, the archive includes 69 entries from Foldit players, plus one entry that has been superseded. (There's even a property FIUSED (as in "Foldit used") for searching for them, see PDB-REDO archive search for the details.) The preprint of the paper Reconstructing Biological Molecules with Help from Video Gamers discusses the Foldit results and includes strategy notes from players.
  • The Minutes of The Hours: 4 April 2025 - Office hour with sciren and ledwitkv is the latest addition to the Office Hour page.
  • PDB-REDO redone: the electron density reconstruction and refinement puzzles have been feeding the PDB-REDO archive. So far, the archive includes 67 entries from Foldit players, plus one entry that has been superseded. (There's even a property FIUSED (as in "Foldit used") for searching for them, see PDB-REDO archive search for the details.) The preprint of the paper Reconstructing Biological Molecules with Help from Video Gamers discusses the Foldit results and includes strategy notes from players.
  • Verfied: the video The Most Useful Thing AI Has Done from Veritasium looks at protein folding. Foldit gets a mention at about 7:09. David Baker appears around 6:34. Welcome to new players!
  • CACHE back: the blog post Foldit does well at CACHE gives more detailed results CACHE challenge #2, which started with Puzzle 2204. The blog post Design SARS-CoV-2 drugs with Foldit for the CACHE Challenge! gave the background. In the results, Foldit is identified as group 1414. A Foldit design identified as CACHE_1414_40 was the highest scoring single molecule. Overall, group 1414 ranked in fourth place, out of 22 groups competing.
  • CASP back: as predicted by Foldit player Jeff101, there's a new CASP16 puzzle this week, Puzzle 2507. It revisits the L5000 ligand seen in Puzzle 2495. This time, there's only one version of the ligand in play, where the previous puzzle had two versions in the ligand queue. As before, the goal is to find the best docking location for the ligand.
  • Trim fit: the Lua functions structure.TrimPose and structure.UntrimPose are now available, allowing recipes to access the Trim tool.
  • Don't give up your shot: see Screenshot for an overview of how to take pictures of your proteins and small molecules. The wiki is always hungry for new screenshots. Post the images over on Discord (#veteran channel preferred), or upload them directly to the wiki yourself. Each puzzle has a puzzle results page, which is usually created shortly after the puzzle opens. We'll have more on the how-to-upload thing in the near future.
  • Pin it down: the new ligand pin finally gives a way to control what turns when you use the Tweak Ligand tool.
  • Density unchained: the new Refine Density tool is now available on some electron density puzzles. The tool refines or "re-phases" the electron density based on the current position of the protein. The Refine Density workshop on YouTube covers the new tool.
  • Strike up the (one-way) band! The long-awaited one-way band is here. The new feature adds "disable pull" and "disable push" to band adjustments, along with length, strength, delete, and disable. There's no recipe interface yet, and a one-way band looks just like an ordinary band.
  • Cool for school: the Education page has been updated to match 2024. The list of puzzles has been updated, and there are now links to the Campaign help when a puzzle is similar. All the Education puzzles now have their own help pages as well. Thanks to Foldit player cjddig for videos covering most of the edu puzzles. See cjddig's YouTube channel for more.
  • Hot hot hotkeys: the Hotkey page now has all known hotkeys. There's also printable cheat sheet in PDF format.
  • Categorically: the Small Molecule Design category is hosting new pages covering the latest version of small molecule, a.k.a. ligand, a.k.a. drug, design. Atom Selection and Fragment Selection start to peel back layers of the onion.

Videos

David_Baker_(U._Washington_HHMI)_Crowd_Sourcing_Protein_Folding_Rosetta@Home_and_FoldIt

David Baker (U. Washington HHMI) Crowd Sourcing Protein Folding Rosetta@Home and FoldIt

David Baker explained Rosetta@Home and Foldit in a video, circa 2013.


Tools, tips, techniques

Several translations of the Foldit Wiki are available:
German Italian Japanese Korean Russian Spanish French

Featured articles

Contents   ( View All Pages - Foldit Wikia Index )

Foldit 1583469164 trimmed

Image credit: silent gene

Players can submit screenshots of their best or most interesting puzzle results. Each puzzle has a page here on the wiki with a gallery for screenshots. See posting results for tips on how to post.

Discord

Join The Foldit Discord Server

Get the Invite

Try Discord as an alternative to Foldit's IRC chat. Key Foldit channels like #veteran and #global are mirrored between Discord and IRC by helpful bots.

The Science

These pages describe the science of protein folding.


Helping out

Please see the Foldit wiki Rules before making changes.

If you are new to Fandom wikis, check out Fandom Basics.

For minor changes (typos, spelling, grammar, etc.) please go ahead and make the change.

For more substantial changes, please join the Foldit Discord server, and introduce yourself on the #wiki channel. The #wiki channel is the best place to discuss new articles or changes to existing articles.

Please try to keep your user name/screen name the same or at least recognizable between Foldit, Discord, and Fandom. That will help prevent confusion and misunderstandings.

The Foldit wiki has a Wanted Articles page, but it's mostly broken links and other things that need to be cleaned up.

The Pages with broken file links is a more specific way to find broken links. It doesn't include things like categories where the optional category page doesn't exist. It should be normally be empty.

The Stubs page on the Foldit wiki is normally empty, but might contain a list of articles that need content added. At some point, the stubs/wanted articles lists might become more relevant, but right now they're not really in use. Adding the template {{Stub}} to a page adds it to the Stubs category.

There's also a community portal page here on the wiki, but it's never been used.

Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.