De novo protein design by citizen scientists.

Online citizen science projects such as GalaxyZoo, Eyewire and Phylo have proven very successful for data collection, annotation and processing, but for the most part have harnessed human pattern-recognition skills rather than human creativity. An exception is the game EteRNA, in which game players learn to build new RNA structures by exploring the discrete two-dimensional space of Watson-Crick base pairing possibilities. Building new proteins, however, is a more challenging task to present in a game, as both the representation and evaluation of a protein structure are intrinsically three-dimensional.