<story><title>Coronavirus Spike Protein Binder Design</title><url>https://fold.it/portal/node/2008926</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>natch</author><text>Strange site. The heading implies that they are attempting to design things that help science, but if you drill in to the pages for &amp;quot;new to fold.it&amp;quot; and FAQ, it never actually says that any of the results are used by anyone. Instead it says that it&amp;#x27;s all a game and the only science goal is to prove that humans are capable (just like computers) of doing this.&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this is really all it is, or if the writers of the FAQ are just myopic about the fact that newcomers don&amp;#x27;t have the big picture, so they just forget to mention whether the results are ever used or not, or even potentially used, or even potentially looked at by anyone who might use them.&lt;p&gt;Reminds me of how a lot of open source packages, when you go to their about page, just have a list of recent updates in highly technical language that assumes the reader is already familiar with the goals of the project.&lt;p&gt;Sites should not assume that the reader already knows what is going on. In this case, the &amp;quot;new to fold.it&amp;quot; page is just a bunch of steps for getting started, with absolutely no overview that makes clear how any of it is all used. Under &amp;quot;goals&amp;quot; the stated science goal is just to prove that humans can solve this kind of puzzles. Really odd that teams would give time to this if it&amp;#x27;s not having any real effect though, so I suspect I&amp;#x27;m missing something?</text></comment>
<story><title>Coronavirus Spike Protein Binder Design</title><url>https://fold.it/portal/node/2008926</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hditorkeif</author><text>This is what antibodies do, right?&lt;p&gt;How exactly does the body figure out how to configure the variable part of the antibody so that it binds? Does it just try countless variations until it finds a match?&lt;p&gt;Can we take an antibody from a healed person and reverse engineer the binding protein?</text></comment>