Friends across the web

From our friends at Fold Commons

Fold Commons is a sister project — a free, AlphaFold-era structural-biology library where curious learners explore real protein shapes, confidence scores, and the science of how life folds together. It shares our values: free, on-device, no accounts, nothing tracked. These 34 tools live on foldcommons.org and open in the same tab.

Each card shows the age range Fold Commons recommends. Younger children (ages 3–8) are kept on Spark & Anvil — we only surface Fold Commons tools for ages 9 and up.

🌱 New at Fold Commons

recently updated

Fresh tools and reading our friends at Fold Commons have updated lately.

For ages 9–14

Junior tools, games, and reading you can share with a 9–14-year-old.

Go deeper Ages 9–14

BuriedBet

See one subunit, bet which parts get buried against its partner, then load the real assembly and score your guess against the true interface — many proteins don’t work alone (ages 9–14).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

FlexiFit

Predict whether a pocket is a rigid keyhole or reshapes on contact — an induced-fit game with live enzyme renders (ages 9–14).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

FoldLens Junior

The K-12 (ages 9–14) sibling of FoldLens: the same AlphaFold Database content in a tier-appropriate voice, NGSS-aligned, COPPA-safe by design. Pick a protein and see its real 3D shape in the browser.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

HearTheChain

An accessibility-first listening game: AlphaFold confidence sonified along the chain as pitch. Match the sound to the protein and learn that low confidence is not the same as unimportant (ages 9–14).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

NotMarbles

A space-filling model looks like a solid pile of marbles, but atoms jiggle — bet which regions hold still and which smear, then watch the mobile ones jitter (ages 9–14).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

PencilOrInk

You are the renderer: choose which parts of a protein to draw in firm ink and which to draw sketchy. Sketchy is how you honestly draw a flexible, functional region (ages 9–14).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

PoreSort

Predict what gets through each real membrane channel (aquaporin-1, GLUT4, CFTR) before the reveal — scored on your prediction, not luck, with a live AlphaFold render.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

ProteinQuest

A COPPA-safe amino-acid sorting game — sort each of the 20 standard amino acids into its property class. No accounts, no outbound links, nothing collected.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

RatchetRun

Set the ATP level and predict a molecular motor’s drift — a biased-random-walk game about why motors ratchet through jitter rather than stride.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9+

The protein-structure pathway

A suggested learning ladder: nineteen rungs from “a cell has parts” to “why prediction is trustworthy”, with two age-band entry points. Each rung links to a free tool, and the prerequisite arrows show what tends to make the next step easier.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

TwoIslands

Paint a Firm-or-Fuzzy prior on two crisp domains, then reveal the real PAE — a gentle confidence game (ages 9–14), scored live from AlphaFold.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

VanishPoint

Drag AlphaFold’s confidence lens and predict where each region vanishes — a game that shows a faded region is usually flexible and functional, not a mistake (ages 9–14).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Go deeper Ages 9–14

VerbSnap

A COPPA-safe science-writing game — call each protein claim mechanism or purpose under a shrinking timer, and rewrite teleology as honest physics.

opens foldcommons.org · in English

For ages 15 and up

Research-grade viewers and readings for older teens and adults.

For older learners Ages 15+

AntibodyAtlas

Find the epitope/paratope interface of an antibody–antigen complex from geometry, clustering the paratope into CDR-like contact loops. A geometric contact map, not an experimentally-mapped epitope.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Read more Ages 15+

CASPTracker

An honest scoreboard of every CASP experiment (1994→2024) built from real published results — no invented GDT_TS, era filters, and a same-origin trajectory chart.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15+

CellTour

Guided, textbook-sourced tours of eight cell types with ordered stops, honest coverage, and step-through — a function-first reader for how cells are built.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Read more Ages 15+

ClinicalAtlas

A sourced tracker of AI-in-clinical-trials milestones, every entry cited, with a strict no-causation posture and honest coverage gauge.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

DisorderDuty

Tag a protein’s low-confidence stretches Broken or Working — the reveal proves Working from live UniProt functional annotations.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

DomainCuts

Carve a protein into its folded domains, then use AlphaFold’s PAE to judge how much to trust the way the domains sit relative to each other (ages 15–18).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15+

FoldCompare

AlphaFold vs Experiment: superpose an experimental structure (PDB) and AlphaFold’s prediction (AFDB) client-side for an honest RMSD diff and per-residue divergence profile.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15+

FoldLens

iPad-first AlphaFold Database browser with honest pLDDT confidence display and on-device Apple Intelligence residue explanations. The lens through which everything else flows.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

GripChain

Set the coupling between hemoglobin’s four subunits and match the real oxygen curve — a game about why an allosteric signal spreads through contact, not instantly (ages 15–18).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

HingeHunt

Judge a crisp AlphaFold model’s domain arrangement, then reveal the PAE — your call scored live from the fetched predicted-aligned-error matrix.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Read more Ages 15+

MoleculeFlow

Landmark closed-loop / self-driving-lab discovery runs, each a five-stage loop cited to its primary paper by DOI, with a hand-drawn closed-loop diagram.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Read more Ages 15+

NobelTimeline

The structural-biology Nobel Prizes as an interactive timeline, with verbatim citations, primary-paper DOIs, and 3D deep-links into the viewer.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

NumberReader

Read the real AlphaFold confidence numbers off human haemoglobin: guess how sure the model is for a region, then see its actual per-residue pLDDT and pairwise PAE — computed live from the model — and say it plainly: a prediction, not an experiment (ages 15–18).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

OneLetterLottery

Draw a real one-letter variant and call its impact before the reveal — a calibration game about why most mutations are quiet and a few are not.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15+

PhenoFold

A phenotype → causal-gene → protein-structure explorer over well-established monogenic conditions, with a live AFDB render and key-residue highlight. Not a predictor or diagnostic.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15+

PocketScout

A binding-pocket finder: enter a UniProt accession or PDB id and it finds candidate cavities in your browser, ranked by a transparent geometric heuristic. Geometry, not a druggability predictor.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Read more Ages 15+

ResearchAtlas

A reader over the Fold Commons research archive — search and read deep reports on AlphaFold and AI for biology, entirely in your browser. The native app adds on-device Apple-Intelligence grounded summaries.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
Read more Ages 16+

SovereignBio

Public AI-biotech capital flows (IPOs, partnerships, funding, M&A) — every figure cited to a primary source, with an honest coverage gauge and an annual-totals chart.

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

SpliceSplit

Compare two spliced isoforms of one gene and pick the exon that explains the difference — splicing makes different chains, not one chain morphing into several shapes (ages 15–18).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

TolerancePaint

Paint which parts of a protein tolerate change, then reveal the real AlphaMissense heatmap — most changes are harmless, the damaging ones cluster at a few critical spots (ages 15–18).

opens foldcommons.org · in English
For older learners Ages 15–18

WhatsMissing

Pick what a single-chain AlphaFold model leaves out — proven live from UniProt cofactor and subunit annotations.

opens foldcommons.org · in English

Try FoldLens right here

Loads the interactive AlphaFold 3-D structure viewer from foldcommons.org. When you tap, your browser contacts Fold Commons (and the AlphaFold Database) to load the 3-D runtime — nothing about you is sent. For older learners (ages 15+).

Prefer to open it on their site? Open the viewer on foldcommons.org →

Looking for our own apps? Browse the Spark & Anvil catalog or the grown-up portfolio map.