Do you want to make a difference and help humanity? Understanding how proteins self-assemble ("protein folding") is a holy grail of modern molecular biophysics. What makes it such a great challenge is its complexity, which renders simulations of folding extremely computationally demanding, and difficult to understand. The Stanford group has developed a new way to simulate protein folding. However, this method is extremely computationally demanding and they need our help. By becoming part of Team AvC and donating the spare cycles of your CPU, you become part of a worldwide effort to help scientists understand and cure some of the worst diseases today...

From Folding @Home website: 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.

For more info visit the F@H site

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