Fighting Coronavirus: Researchers use crowdsourcing gamification technique to inspire citizen scientists to design new drugs - Express Computer

The best thing most of us can do to fight COVID-19 is stay home, to curb the respiratory disease's spread. But anyone with a computer can pitch in more actively too: by helping scientists design drugs to combat the virus now responsible for hundreds of thousands of infections worldwide. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator David Baker creates new proteins tailor-made for specific tasks. Now, his team at the University of Washington is hunting for proteins that might stop the novel coronavirus (called SARS-CoV-2) from infecting human cells -- and they're enlisting citizen scientists to help via a free computer game called Foldit. Foldit players around the world compete to solve protein puzzles digitally, designing molecules with certain specs.