Foldit Wiki

Welcome to the Foldit Wiki

Details and updates :

Foldit Status
- 11pm Sunday 3rd August UTC/ZULU: Services are still unavailable - no estimated time of restoration is available.
- 2pm - Sunday 3rd August UTC/ZULU: The Foldit service is currently experiencing an unscheduled outage, please see the IRC chat info (next link) to keep up with service restoration progress. Or just try again a bit later.

Foldit Chat Guidelines
Foldit IRC (chat) Information

Foldit is an online game in which humans try to solve one of the hardest computational problems in biology: protein folding. You don't need to know anything about biology to play the game, although a little background will help. Most of the players of Foldit are not biologists.

The official site of Foldit can be found here.

Foldit Translations

Foldit Wiki is also available in: German Italian Japanese Korean Russian Spanish

Foldit Accessibility

Contents   ( View All Pages - Foldit Wikia Index )

Downloading and Installing Foldit

Foldit can be played on:

• [Windows]
• [Macintosh OSX]
• [Linux] Install instructions

Click the appropriate link to download the version for your operating system.

New Players

Why fold? This article explains the basics of Foldit: [The Science Behind Foldit]

The place to get started is the tutorial puzzles. Make sure that you do all of those before trying a science puzzle.

• Tutorial Puzzles (deutsch) (svenska)

What Next?

• Foldit 101 <- Helps with all of the other things you may find useful to know including recipes.
• FAQs <- Frequently asked questions (including Tracks & Multiple Foldit clients)
• How to get started <- With pictures from an actual puzzle
• Puzzle Results <- Look here to see some pictures on solutions submitted by players

A very good 40 minute video by Firas Khatib (Beta_Helix), describing Foldit, the basics of the science of protein folding, scoring, CASP, and answering many other questions about protein folding: [Beta's Foldit video]

Featured articles

• Hand-folding vs. scripts: The Dishwasher Analogy
• De-novo
• Shortcut Keys
• Cutpoints

Players

• Groups
• Foldit Legends <- LFB was here!

Strategy

These pages describe how to get better scores.

• Suggested Methods (pages written by individual players or team, links to videos)
• Strategy
  • Aesthetics
  • Compactness
    • Voids
  • Stability
  • Mojo
  • Opening
  • Middlegame
  • Endgame
  • Manipulation of the protein
    • Nudge
    • Local Rebuild Strategy
    • Manual Rebuild
    • Global Lock/Wiggle Strategy
    • Local wiggle
    • Local Wiggle Strategy
    • Sad Local Wiggle Strategy
    • Resetting Score
    • Sheet flattening techniques
    • Sidechain flipping
    • Sidechain Position
    • Use Undo Graph To Monitor Score Accurately
• Proverbs

Have you just finished the tutorials and see this? What does a winning result look like? We've asked the top players to post their solutions to previous puzzles and they graciously shared their results. Read on to see their solutions!

The Science

These pages describe the science of protein folding.

• Structure
• Primary structure
  • Amino Acids
  • AA in Foldit
  • Backbone
  • Peptide Bond
  • Sidechain
• Secondary Structure
  • Sheet
  • Helix
  • Disulfide Bridge
  • Glycine Hinge
  • U-Turn
• Hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity
  • Hydrophobicity
  • Hydropathy index
• Protein Folding Theory
• CASP
• Rosetta@Home
• Biochemistry I

The Game

These pages describe the mechanics of the Foldit game.

• Score
• Shortcut Keys
• Lua Scripting
• Tools
  • Freeze
  • Rebuild
  • Rubber Bands
  • Shake Sidechains
  • Tweak
  • Wiggle
  • The Alignment Tool
  • Cutpoints
  • Contact map

Research

• The Research Room
• The Foldit Developer's blog

Helping out

This is a wiki about the Foldit game that anyone can edit. Before you do edit it, however, please take a look around and determine whether or not the article you'd like to write already exists. (If it does exist, feel free to make it better!)

To write a new article, just enter the article title in the box below.

<createbox> width=24 break=no buttonlabel=Create new article </createbox>

Not sure where to start?

• Find out more about the wiki on the About page.
• If you are new to wikis, check out the tutorial.
• Check out Help:Starting this wiki if you're setting up the wiki.

Adding content

• Every wiki has two list of articles that need help called "Stubs" and "Wanted Articles". Don't be shy, get in there.
• Uploading images is another really easy way to help out - see the Special:Upload page!
• You can find a list of useful templates on Category:Templates, some of which are documented on the templates project page.

Talk and more...

• Check out the community portal to see what the community is working on, to give feedback or just to say hi.