For the last two days I've continued working on some of the other beginner protein puzzles. Some examples of these will be shown below. I also attempted some of the intermediate work but found it to be very difficult, making little to no significant progress. Nevertheless, next week I will attempt more intermediate puzzles after I've reviewed some of the intro puzzles to refresh my memory of different techniques.

-Franklin O

A New Beginning

Today was my first official day as a member of the computational chemistry project here at Bergen Community College. It's been quite some time since I worked on the foldit tutorial puzzles, so I was quite rusty. Luckily, Dr. Rezae reminded me of many of the tools used when trying to properly restructure the Proteins in these puzzles. I spent the majority of my time today working on the puzzle shown below, managing to achieve a rank 3 score on the user ladder. In the coming days, I'll work on several other puzzles. However, I'll be less meticulous in my efforts in solving each individual puzzle but instead simply try to gain more general experience with the foldit program.

-Franklin O

Today i was able to complete another lab and submit the design.  I also got into the top 1,000 on eteRNA.  The lab that i completed was Exclusion NG 1 and the picture will be below.  I also started the tutorials for another game based research called Foldit.  the game is a bit more active and deals with proteins and not RNA.

Today I was able to submit my first lab for the ETErna website. The lab was titled Sensor, lab turn-off Variant 1.  The most important part of he structure is that i was able to get the percent of adenine down to 10%, and still have the structure retain the desired shapes.

The past few days I have been watching videos and reading up on tutorials that are on the eterna website in order to gain skills for the switch labs. This is the link to the tutorial i have been using, on top of the eterna skills you will learn a lot about RNA and entropy.  It is a good way to learn more about the topic.  https://getsatisfaction.com/eternagame/topics/switch-lab-intro.  On top of all this i have been working on challenges that are a little more difficult and I am still attempting switches. Right now my current rank is 2,249. Here is an example of the switch i am currently stuck on. It is the Pincers (switch) Challenge.

Progress on Eterna

Today I worked on some more challenges on Eterna to practice loop boosting . I completed 50 puzzles and achieved level 2 Puzzle Master. My rank is 6592 and I plan to complete more challenges.Below is an example of a challenge I completed. I have not worked on switched yet and I plan to complete some challenges to get experience on switches so that I may be able to complete a real-world example.

        Today I continued working on the challenges on EteRNA and have continued to learn little key tips to strengthen the RNA strands.  I am still having a problem with the switch RNA and finding a way to have the strand work in both forms. Today I finished my 50th puzzle and completed the second round of puzzle master.  I keep attempting the labs though my problems with doing switches is making them even harder.  I will continue to practice switches and will also begin to study RNA outside of the EteRNA website.