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Fun with Proteins

Sometime soon, I'm going to post on the germ-fighting properties of coconut oil. (In a nutshell, your body converts the oil into a microbe killing machine--as long as the microbes are lipid coated. If you have staph or H. pylori, among other things, it could help. Cold sufferers, you're on your own.) It might even help HIV. FWIW, it helped my recent ear ache.

Meantime, I've been taking another approach to help medical science: a video game called Fold.it. Computers aren't very good at determining how proteins are folded. Some humans are good at spatial problems, but most of us don't know much about molecular biology and aren't inclined to read a book on the subject. So a group at the University of Washington created Fold.it.


I'm a bit puffed up about placing 8th out of 298 players in my first competition, and being first and third in two others in progress.

Want to try it? Go to fold.it and download the game (for free), go through the beginner's tutorial, and start playing.
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