firecat | LiveJournalers folding@home team

New team "LJ Folders" with number 31930 has been founded by

firecat

To join the folding@home distributed computing project, go to folding.stanford.edu

To add yourself to the team, go to the Identity preferences area of your folding@home program and enter the above team number.

From the folding@home home page:

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.

This maybe isn't as cool as SETI@home, but I think it's more important.