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Do Something Useful With Your Computer

Sun, 04/11/2004 - 10:34am — JudgeJones

Wanna do something really useful with your computer that sits idle a lot of the time? Do some genome research with it. No, you don't have to first get your PhD in microbiology.

Go to the Folding@Home distributed computing page. Their lead-in info is:

Our goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation,
and related diseases

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, 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.

Results from Folding@Home
simulations of villin