Folding@Home

[CaleyD]

Many will have heard of Seti@Home - a small programme that runs in the background on your computer and process information packets from the many telescopes round the world which are "Searching for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence".

I happened upon something along the same lines called Folding@Home - no, it has nothing to do with ironing or yoga - it is a similar system to Seti@Home except you run a small programme to help process Protein Folding information.

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?

Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

Many of us use Computers with processors far beyond our normal usage requirements, so it seems a waste to have it sitting there doing nothing when we can all be doing our bit to help scientists etc better understand many of the diseases which will likely have touched on all our lives at some point.

Even if your not on the fastest of computers they have a "Screensaver Only" setup which means the programme only processes information when your not using it.

I thought it would be a good idea if people were interested that we all band together under a single username and attach ourselves to an existing larger team - if this is what people want to do then I have created the username "CaleyThistleOnline_com" and attached it to Team Number "35947" - just download the programme and enter these details on the configuration screen.

Information on the entire project and the programme to download are available at http://folding.stanford.edu/