HearTheChain
A little game you can play with your eyes shut. Every AlphaFold model comes with a confidence score for each residue (called pLDDT). HearTheChain plays that confidence along the chain as pitch — high notes where the model is sure, low notes where it is not. Listen to a trace, name the protein, then answer the real question: does a low note mean the model failed? (It usually does not.) Nothing is installed; nothing about you is collected.
This is an accessibility-first tool. You can play it entirely by ear and keyboard, and every trace can also be described in words (press D) or shown as a coloured bar chart on reveal — so it works whether you rely on sound, sight, or neither. The full profile of every protein is in the guide below, which works with or without JavaScript.
Loading the game… If it does not start, the full confidence profiles below still work.
How to play. Press Start. A confidence trace plays as a run of notes from the start of the chain to the end. Press R to replay or D to hear it described in words, then press 1–4 to name the protein. If the trace had a low stretch, you are asked whether low confidence means the prediction failed — press T for true or F for false. There is no way to lose: every round ends with the honest answer.
What the notes mean: pLDDT confidence
AlphaFold does not just guess a shape — for every residue it also reports how sure it is, a score from 0 to 100 called pLDDT. EMBL-EBI colours the model by four bands. HearTheChain maps the same score to pitch: a very-high residue is a high note, a very-low one is a low note.
- Very high (pLDDT ≥ 90) — a backbone you can usually trust
- Confident (pLDDT 70–90) — a good guess at the fold
- Low (pLDDT 50–70) — treat the exact shape with caution
- Very low (pLDDT < 50) — often a genuinely disordered stretch — not a failure
The one idea to take away. A low, quiet stretch is not a failed prediction and not an unimportant protein. It means AlphaFold sees no single fixed shape for that region on its own — most often genuine intrinsic disorder, but sometimes a flexible linker between domains, or a part that only folds once it grabs a partner. In every case that is an honest report on a dynamic region, which is often exactly where the biology happens. Alpha-synuclein is almost entirely low-confidence, and it is one of the most-studied proteins in all of neuroscience.
The protein profiles
Every trace in the game is the confidence profile of a real protein in the AlphaFold Database, read from the start of the chain to the end. The profiles below are a coarse, honest sketch of the real per-residue confidence — the teaching point is the shape of confidence along the chain, not the exact numbers.
| Protein | What it is | Confidence trace (start → end) | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alpha-synuclein P37840 | A small brain protein at the heart of Parkinson’s disease. | very low almost the whole way along | Intrinsically disordered: it has no single fixed shape in the cell, and that flexibility IS its biology. The all-low trace is honest about real disorder — not a broken prediction, and certainly not an unimportant protein. This is the trap the game is built around. |
| Lysozyme C P61626 | A compact enzyme in tears and saliva that cracks bacterial cell walls. | rising quickly to high, staying high, easing off at the very end | A small, well-folded enzyme — high confidence almost end to end, because its shape really is rigid and well determined. |
| Haemoglobin, alpha chain P69905 | The oxygen-carrying globin that colours your blood red. | high across almost the whole chain | A classic globin fold — compact and well determined, so confidence stays high the whole way along. |
| Ubiquitin P0CG47 | A tiny tag the cell sticks onto proteins to mark them for recycling. | very high across its short length | One of the most stable little folds in biology — confidence is very high all the way across. |
| p53 (tumour suppressor) P04637 | The “guardian of the genome” — it decides whether a damaged cell keeps dividing. | low at the start, a tall high block in the middle, falling to low at the end | A mixed trace: a well-folded DNA-binding core (high) flanked by genuinely disordered ends (low). Low there means flexible-and-regulatory, not wrong. |
| BRCA1 P38398 | A large DNA-repair protein; faults in it raise breast- and ovarian-cancer risk. | high at both ends with a long very-low valley across the middle | Two small folded modules at the ends (high) joined by a huge disordered middle (very low). Most of BRCA1 has no fixed shape on its own. |
Methods & about
This is a teaching game, and it is honest about being a simplification. The traces are coarse per-segment sketches of each model's AlphaFold pLDDT profile, not the exact per-residue values; the confidence bands follow EMBL-EBI's own colour cut-offs (≥90 / 70–90 / 50–70 / <50). The misconception it targets — that low confidence means the model is wrong or the region does not matter — is a documented novice reading of the AlphaFold confidence colouring; the honest counter is that low pLDDT reports a region with no single fixed shape on its own (most often intrinsic disorder, but also flexible linkers or fold-on-binding parts), which is frequently functional. Every profile is written by hand, not generated. The game keeps no score history, uses no accounts, and sends nothing anywhere.
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