Puzzling proteins

Put your visualisation skills to work for scientific research at Foldit, a computer game pitting humans against computers in the race to understand the function of proteins.

Why humans, when computers are so much faster? According to the people at Foldit: “We’re collecting data to find out if humans’ pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!”

You can search our contemporary research images for some eye-catching folds like the one below. Wellcome Images also has a gallery of research images from the recent Wellcome Image Awards available to view online.