LiveJournalers folding@home team

[firecat]

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.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I've been on the Arthritis Warriors (http://arthritisinsight.com/community/folding/) team for ages, but haven't re-started it since I last re-installed Windows. Thanks for the reminder.

[jodawi.livejournal.com]

i've decided the etis are screening all incoming electromagnetic information making it impossible to detect anything. but nevertheless, i am found to like seti@home better than folding, because folding happens in huge chunks that take me forever and therefore does not stimulate the pleasure center.