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Random observations, teachings and musings of a well trained cubicle superhero.
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Saturday, September 11, 2004

Folding @Home Distributed Computing with REAL Purpose

The Folding@home project is a Distributed Computing effort to study the folding of proteins. Proteins are responsible for many functions at the cellular level. The project is studying the way proteins fold and misfold. A misfolded protein can cause such diseases as Cystic Fibrosis and Alzheimer’s. To make proteins, cellular machines known as ribosomes, string together amino acids into long linear chains. Like a rope, these chains loop about each other in a variety of ways (i.e., they fold). But, as with a tying a knot, only one of these many ways allows the protein to function properly. Yet lack of function is not always the worst scenario. For just as a hopelessly knotted rope can be worse than one that won't stay tied, too much of a misfolded protein could be worse than too little of a normally folded one. This is because misfolded proteins can clump together, if this happens within the brain the result can be BSE (Mad Cow Disease).
The official download site can be found at http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html. There are three Windows versions available for download along with versions for Linux, and Mac OS X systems
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