There have been some successes in adopting distributed computing tools and social networks into biological research. Social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us (http://www.delicious.com/), CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org) or Connotea (which was created by Nature Publishing Group; http://www.connotea.org/) allow users to tag and share papers and have existed for several years. Patients with the same medical conditions can connect with one another on social networks run by companies like PatientsLikeMe (http://www.patientslikeme.com/) or CureTogether (http://curetogether.com/). And for ∼10 years, the Folding@home project (http://folding.stanford.edu/) has been leveraging participants' desktop computers or gaming consoles to study protein folding. But how else can computational paradigms that have permeated broader society be harnessed to drive scientific discovery?
The advance. Two papers1,2 identified by our survey respondents highlight the potential impact of 'nontraditional' computing advances. The first is FoldIt, a multiplayer online game for predicting protein structures. David Baker and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle created a Web-based graphical interface that allowed players to manipulate a protein structure as if they were solving a visual puzzle1. This harnessed humans' spatial reasoning skills to improve computational predictions of the most likely protein conformation. Players competed against one another and were ranked on a scoreboard. When protein structures derived by FoldIt players were compared against structures predicted by a traditional computational approach, FoldIt predictions were as good or better in seven of ten test cases.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution