AFP has reported that online gamers have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that has thwarted scientists for nearly a decade.

The exploit was published on Sunday in the journal of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where gamers and researchers have been credited as co-authors.

The enzyme in question was a monomeric protease enzyme, a cutting agent in the complex molecular tailoring of retroviruses, a family that includes HIV.

A microscope only provides a 2D image of what to the viewer looks like a plate of one-dimensional spaghetti. The problem with the microscope is that it doesn’t provide pharmacologists with a 3D picture that “unfolds” the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs.

The Foldit application was developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids which make up proteins, using a set of online tools.

The gamers produced an accurate model of the enzyme in just three weeks, far quicker than scientists expected.

According to the study, solving the enzyme problem, “provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs”. Antiretrovirals are the only effective medication against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” said Firas Khatib from the University’s biochemistry lab.

“The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

One of Foldit’s developers, Seth Cooper, explained why gamers had succeeded where computers had failed. “People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at,” he said.

“Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week’s paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before.”

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