| abstract
| - Part of the challenge in Foldit is hand-folding, which consists of manually dragging parts of the protein to new locations. Foldit also offers a number of tools which attempt to automatically improve various aspects of a given fold. These tools can be invoked manually from the Foldit GUI interface, or programmatically from a Foldit recipe. This article describes the main Foldit tools and the considerations for using them. The exact details of how these tools work are hard to come by. Some of the tools may correspond closely to functions of the Rosetta software that underlies Foldit. The goal of this article is to describe the tools at a high level, without digging down to the level of the Rosetta algorithms. As a result, descriptions may say that a tool "seems to" or "appears to" work in a particular way. All of the tools can either operate on the entire protein or only on selected segments of the protein. When using the tools manually, it may be desirable to switch to the Foldit selection interface, which, as the name implies, allows individual segments and groups of segments to be selected. Segments can also be selected programmatically through recipes written using the Foldit Lua interface, version 2. The keyboard shortcuts referenced in this article are the ones found in the selection interface in a Windows client using the English language.
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