Computing For A Cause.

[leezard]

Theres a program at Stanford University called Folding@Home that uses distributed computing to study protein folding, misfolding, 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

 

you can see some of the results they have so far here. F@H Results

 

Why am I posting this here?

You can have F@H teams, I've been running F@H for about 6 months for a computer related websites folding team, There are no prizes or anything, just some friendly competition with other teams as well as team members. If anyone is interested, and the Head_Guru ok's it, I can set up a TCH team. (Another side bonus to this will be more inbound links for TCH )

 

Heres the link to the website if anyone wants some more info. Folding@Home

[Head Guru]

an excellent thing to use spare cpu cycles on.

 

used to run seti@home