Protein Folding
Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they assemble themselves, or ‘fold’ and yet the process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Not surprisingly when proteins do not fold correctly there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson’s disease.
Folding@Home
Folding@Home (folding.stanford.edu) is the first ‘distributed computing’ project that has led to a research paper published in a top scientific journal. Its aim is to use the spare computational power of thousands of computers to simulate the way proteins are made.
Understanding how proteins fold will likely have a great impact on understanding a wide range of diseases and although Protein S Deficiency is not yet singled out for any special attention by the Folding@Home project it is nevertheless very significant that Protein Science is being advanced in such a novel and successful way.
How to Participate
You can support this research effort by running a program on your computer. It is designed to run in the background so that the number crunching can be done when you aren’t busy and when the computer would otherwise be idle. It is quick to download and install and afterwards requires very little time for maintenance. It can automatically send the results of your folding simulations back to the team at Stanford University and pick up the next assignment.
The software is available free of charge for Mac OS X, Windows (all versions), Linux (32/64 bit) and can be downloaded from folding.stanford.edu/start-folding
Join the Team
After you have installed the software you can join the Protein S Deficiency Team
- Our team number is ‘11449’ (enter this in your settings)
- Our team name is ‘Protein S Deficiency’
We have our own Team Page hosted on the Stanford University web server.
Screensavers crack medical puzzle (22 Oct 2002)
Absolute comparison of simulated and experimental protein-folding dynamics: Christopher D. Snow, Houbi Nguyen, Vijay S. Pande & Martin Gruebele
About The Pande Group
The Pande Group works on theory and simulations of how proteins, RNA, and nanoscale synthetic polymers fold. They developed the ensemble dynamics method and its application to protein folding and wrote the client and server code for the Folding@Home project. Vijay S Pande is Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University.
Vijay has sent us an email to thank us for our support. Thank you Vijay and keep up the good work!
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Last updated: Wednesday, 3rd January 2018
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