We thank all Foldit players for their gameplay contributions, and for feedback offered on the Foldit website (https://fold.it). We thank A. Kang, S. A. Rettie, C. Chow and L. Carter for help with experiments; D. Alonso, L. Goldschmidt, P. Vecchiato and D. Kim for computer support; and Rosetta@home (https://boinc.bakerlab.org) volunteers for computing resources. We thank G. Rocklin, V. Mulligan and other members of the Baker laboratory for discussions. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship under grant no. DGE-1256082, NSF grant no. 1629879, National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant 1UH2CA203780, and NIH grants 1S10 OD018207 and 5R01 GM120574 (to G.T.M.) and HHMI (D.B.). The ALS-ENABLE beamlines are supported in part by the NIH, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, grant P30 GM124169-01. The Advanced Light Source is a DOE User Facility under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. Foldit3 was a nominated target of the CASP COMMONS Community Outreach program.

Reviewer information

Nature thanks Jérôme Waldispuhl and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.