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.
You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
What have we done so far?
We have had several successes. You can read about them on our
Science page, on our
Awards page, or go directly to our
Results page.
Want to learn more?
Click
here to go directly to the Folding@Home website. Also, you can learn more by watching recent seminars (Stanford BMI ; Xerox PARC). One can also help by donating funds to the project, via Stanford University.
How to join the Doggyhelp.com Folding@Home team.
Click
here to download the folding software and then enter our team number: 92587. If you need help, use the contact link at the top of the form and our folding@home captain, Adam will help you through the process.
