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游戏玩家破解蛋白质谜题，艾滋病、癌症研究有望获重大突破,这一成果刊登在最新的《自然—结构与分子生物学》（Nature Structural & Molecular Biology）杂志上。
http://www.36kr.com/p/48161.html
仅用了三周时间，游戏玩家就解决了一个困扰科学家好几年的难题。一群玩家通过玩游戏发现了一种蛋白质的结构，这种蛋白质在艾滋病毒生长过程中起到了至关重要的作用。该发现标志着人类有望在艾滋病毒（HIV）和艾滋病（AIDS）研究领域获得重大突破。这一成果刊登在《自然—结构与分子生物学》（Nature Structural & Molecular Biology）杂志上。
在一款名叫Foldit的游戏中，玩家可以预测逆转录病毒蛋白酶的结构，这种酶在艾滋病毒复制过程中起到了关键作用。从理论上讲，解开这种蛋白质的结构可以帮助科学家开发阻止蛋白酶传布的药物。
“很多人尝试通过分子替代的方法解决M-PMV的晶体结构问题，但都失败了，于是我们向蛋白质折叠游戏Foldit的玩家发起了挑战，让他们制作该蛋白质的精确模型。出人意料的是，这些玩家制作的模型质量很高，可成功地用于分子替代和结构判断。这种更准确的结构为设计抗逆转录病毒药物提供了新的见解。”
人类具有空间推理能力，这是计算机所不擅长的。游戏则提供了一个框架，把计算机和人类的优势整合到一起。Foldit首席设计师Seth Cooper说到。
这项通过Foldit取得的突破不仅可用于艾滋病研究，还可用于癌症和帕金森症的研究。
该研究报告原文：http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf
这个foldit软件原来是Rosetta@home项目组做出来的，而且刚刚看了Rosetta@home的网站http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/，发现最近有很多令人鼓舞的实质性进展，《自然》期刊连续几期都发表Rosetta@home的成果？摘录如下：
1.Oct 6, 2011
Journal post from David Baker
A recent issue of Nature describes an exciting result from Rosetta@home in collaboration with the NMR spectroscopy laboratory of Lewis Kay in Toronto. Like almost all machines, proteins in order to carry out their functions have to move (change their conformation somewhat) but it has been extremely difficult to determine what these conformational changes are. Lewis Kay's group has developed new methods for getting experimental information on the higher energy very shortlived conformations proteins visit while carrying out their functions. This data is not sufficient to determine the structure of these "excited state" conformations using conventional methods. However, as the paper shows, we can use these experimental data to guide Rosetta and Rosetta@home structure calculations, and produce models of these states. We went one step further than this in the paper by using Rosetta design calculations to stabilize the excited state, and subsequent experiments confirmed the validity of the model. This combination of experimental NMR data, Rosetta structure calculations, and Rosetta design should be very powerful in understanding how proteins carry out their functions.
2.Sep 19, 2011
Journal post from David Baker
Today's issue of Nature Structural Biology reports the determination of the structure of a protein by FoldIt players. This is exciting because it is perhaps the first example of a long standing scientific problem solved by non-scientists. You might read about this in your newspaper; here is a report that does a good job in explaining how FoldIt came out of Rosetta@home:
http://the-scientist.com/2011/09 ... -protein-structure/
3.Jun 18, 2011
Journal post from David Baker
This week's issue of Nature magazine has an exciting article (http://www.nature.com/nature/jou ... ll/nature10154.html) describing work we are doing with collaborators using Rosetta to design a new class of inhibitors of amyloid fibril formation. Amyloid fibrils have been implicated in Alzheimer's and many other diseases. The designed peptides are not suitable for use as actual therapeutics in their present form, but hopefully will help lead the way to effective drugs.
4.
May 18, 2011
Journal post from David Baker
A recent issue of Nature describes an exciting approach we are taking with collaborators to fight Malaria. The title of the paper is "A synthetic homing endonuclease-based gene drive system in the human malaria mosquito" and the PDF is available at my lab web site. The idea is to use enzymes which cut within critical genes in mosquitos to greatly reduce the number of malaria parasite infected mosquitos. There are still many issues that must be overcome for this strategy to be used against malaria in the real world, but this paper is an important first proof of concept of the strategy.
看来要多抽一些运算时间出来投入到Rosetta@home项目才行，最新的消息太令人兴奋了， FAH要加把劲才行。 |
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发表于 2011-10-22 16:32:04
发表于 2011-10-24 10:29:15