Folding@Home, located at Stanford University, California states:
Our goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases
Frequenty asked questions.
Cut to the chase - get started & download. [Treowth started a team named "Ramboids". If you would like to join this team, when prompted to confirm your donator name insert 43656 on the team number line. Rambus dismissers are also welcome to join this good cause!]
What are proteins and why do they "fold"? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease.
What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.
How can you help? You can help our project by downloading and running our client software. Our algorithms are designed such that for every computer that joins the project, we get a commensurate increase in simulation speed.
Hat tip to Anandtech.com for starting a team (ranked very high) and encouraging others to become involved in distributed computing.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
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3 comments:
A similar project is the World Community Grid:
"The Human Proteome Folding project will provide scientists with data that predicts the shape of a very large number of human proteins. These predictions will give scientists the clues they need to identify the biological functions of individual proteins within the human body. With an understanding of how each protein affects human health, scientists can develop new cures for human diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and malaria."
I should have also mentioned Google compute, an additional feature of the Google toolbar. You can download it from the Google labs site. The current beneficiary of your computer's idle time is Folding@home.
Brent . . . Thank you
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