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
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.
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
Note: this list gets updated weekly, often after the last puzzle expires. See the official list of puzzles for the most current puzzle info.
- Puzzle 2543: Revisiting Puzzle 84: Giant Anemone, expires 11 December 2024.
- Puzzle 2541: Unsolved Voltage-gated Ion Channel Cryo-EM Density Puzzle, expires 13 December 2024. The Foldit blog post New Unsolved VGIC Cryo-EM Density Puzzle! gives the background on this puzzle. This puzzle runs for two weeks!
- Puzzle 2544: KCNT1 Round 1, expires 13 December 2024.
- As always, there's the Campaign to get started, and then Beginner Puzzles which allow players to hone their skills.
- Blast from the past: the Protein Design Sandbox puzzle looks back to when Foldit players were creating brand-new proteins. Since then, new AI technology has learned to design proteins that actually do something more than just fold up on their own. It's not clear whether Foldit will ever return to protein design, but the Sandbox puzzle has most of the tools that were used. You'll need to check "show beginner puzzles" in the puzzle menu to see it. The Sandbox puzzle will eventually award points to beginners, but it won't expire until April 2025, so players will have to wait for those points. (Will you still be a beginner then?)
Updates
- 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.
- Summer repeats: this week introduces a new series of small molecule design puzzles, targeting KCNQ1 and long QT syndrome. The Foldit blog post KCNQ1: A Quest to Combat Long QT Syndrome explains the new challenge.
- Not too dense: a paper based on the Electron Density Reconstruction series is now available as a preprint. The Foldit blog post Reconstruction paper preprint up! gives the background. See Reconstructing Biological Molecules with Help from Video Gamers for the paper itself. The paper includes extensive quotes from Foldit players.
- 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.
- Blupdate: there are new results, so the SARS Nsp3 CACHE Challenge preliminary results blog post has been updated. With improved methods, the CACHE organizers found four additional Foldit compounds that passed initial screening. Three compounds from Bruno Kestemont and one from nspc join the two that were tagged initially. (One from ucad, and one from Sandrix72.) The section titled "UPDATE – Additional compounds!" has the molecule diagrams and SMILES for the new results. (Due to competition deadlines, the CACHE puzzles appear to have finished for now.)
- Recon decon: the goals of the Electron Density Reconstruction series were clarified 20 December 2023 in an office hour. Foldit developer petridecus led the discussion, with participation from beta_helix and seth.cooper as well. It turns out our ED recon results are being compared to what the PDB Redo project has come up with.
- Refined Density: the new Refine Density tool is previewed in devprev in a test [Devprev] Density Refinement Puzzle. The new tool refines or "rephases" the density based on the current position of the protein. The test puzzle has been renewed several times as development continues.u
- Hot hot hotkeys: the Hotkey page now has all known hotkeys. There's also printable cheat sheet in PDF format.
- Drugit - the Foldit blog announced that the preprint of the VHL ligand design paper is now available on ChemRxiv. Congratulations to Foldit player Nicm25, who gets prominent mention in the text. The paper actually uses the term "Drugit" to describe small molecule design in Foldit. The full title is "Drugit: Crowd-sourcing molecular design of non-peptidic VHL binders".
- Oldit, getting old - the old Foldit website is still available at http://old.fold.it/portal/, but it's certificate has expired. Depending on which browser you use, you'll still be able to access it if you click through several security warnings. As long as you don't post your credit card numbers or medical information, the old site should be mostly harmless. The Foldit team stresses that the old site will go away at some point.
- Face/Off: the new Foldit user interface is now the only Foldit interface. In the streamlined new version, the original interface and its pie menus are gone, and the selection interface has been reorganized. The Foldit blog post New Foldit Interface describes the result. The post Guide To Interface Changes helps track down various features in their new locations. Here on the wiki new interface icons to a quick guide to the icons in the action bar, and new interface migration for a more complete look at the changes.
- 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.
- AI, AI, AI - the AlphaFold AI protein predictor is now available as a tool in Foldit. Lab Report #23: AlphaFold in Foldit and the blog post The AlphaFold prediction tool in Foldit have more on this new tool.
Videos
- FolditatUW - foldit's official YouTube channel.
- P1 - Introduction to Protein Design (15m)
- P2 - Design of New Protein Functions (27m)
- Beta_Helix's Foldit video the basics explained (40m)
- Through the eyes of a scientist Design solutions reviewed (26m)
- Design solutions reviewed Part 2 (22m)
- As seen on TV: Origami Revolution. Nova on PBS featured protein folding, David Baker, Rosetta@Home and Foldit. (Minutes 20 through 28, with Foldit briefly mentioned at 23:45.)
Tools, tips, techniques
- Foldit 101 - Useful information about Puzzle Types, the Cookbook and recipe basics.
- How to get started - With pictures from an actual puzzle
- Puzzle Results - screen shots of top scoring and interesting player solutions.
- Blackbelt Folding - Sessions 1,2, 3 & 4 denovo
- Electron Density - info and videos
- Hydrogen Bond Networks
- Download-Install-Troubleshoot includes Tracks, devprev and using multiple clients on Windows, Mac and Linux
- Foldit chat (IRC)
- Frequently asked questions
- Foldit Accessibility
- Foldit Translations
Several translations of the Foldit Wiki are available:
German
Italian Japanese Korean
Russian
Spanish
French
Featured articles
- Strategy - how to improve your score
- TheGame - tools, score details and Lua scripting
- Groups-Players - groups (teams), players and a bit of humour.
- The Research Room - advanced discussions and lots of external links
- Scientist and Developer Chats
- Hydrogen Bond Networks
- Small molecule design puzzles
- Interesting Articles
Contents ( View All Pages - Foldit Wikia Index )
Players can submit screenshots of their best or most interesting results using the camera button in chat. The Foldit wiki has thousands of these images. See recent puzzle results and older results for a complete list. See posting results for tips on how to post.
Discord
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.
- Structure
- Primary Structure
- Secondary Structure
- Hydrophilic and Hydrophobic (also known as "blue out, orange in")
- Protein Folding Theory
- CASP
- Rosetta@Home
- Biochemistry I
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.