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What does protein folding have to do with astronomy?

02/09/2005 08:00AM

What does protein folding have to do with astronomy?
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. They use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed them to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct their approach to examine folding related disease.

How can you help? You can help by downloading and running their client software. Their algorithms are designed such that for every computer that joins the project, they get a commensurate increase in simulation speed.

For those requiring an OTVR (On Topic Verification Rationalization), it can be supposed that protein folding research be viewed as a credible and fundamental ancillary to planetary geological and organic compound analysis. Or not :-)

Click here for more about this down-home alternative to SETI@HOME and to sign up if you wish. -Ed.