How 100,000 Gamers Are Unraveling The Secret Life Of Proteins

摘要

As soon as Zoran Popovic saw the hair, he knew he was looking at David Baker. It was unmistakable: Baker's face is surrounded by an umbra of curls that organize themselves into unpredictable spirals-not unlike the complex protein molecules he studies. They hadn't met before; Popovic is an expert in graphics, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Baker is a biochemistry professor with a laboratory a few blocks away. But David Salesin, another computer scientist and a friend of Baker's, had arranged for the three of them to meet for lunch in a restaurant near campus, because Baker needed help with a tricky problem-and it was exactly the kind of problem Popovic was good at solving. Baker was the Most Valuable Player in the protein chemistry world's biennial World Series, a competition to see who can predict the shape a protein will fold into, knowing nothing more than the sequence of its constituent parts. It's called the Community-Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction, or CASP.