State Of The Fold

It has been quite a while since I reported news on our Folding at Home team. For those of you who are new to this blog, Folding at Home is a research project run by Stanford University. The goal of this project is to discover the reason why proteins fold abnormally in the body. This "folding" is the cause of many different diseases, including amyloidosis.

Because of the speed at which this process occurs, discovering how the secrets of protein folding has been quite difficult. The Folding at Home project attempts to solve this mystery by simulating proteins at a molecular level, then twisting and turning the model in many different ways to get it to fold in the same manner of certain diseases. By understanding this process, scientists can make drugs to stop it, potentially curing many diseases.

As you can imagine, simulating a protein fold is quite complex. It takes thousands of hours of computer processing to perform one. The Folding at Home project is quite ingenious -- it uses the spare computer cycles of people's home computers to do some of this work. Although a home computer is quite slower than a supercomputer, you can do amazing things if you run it on many, many home computers!

People who participate in this project can form teams, in order to promote awareness to certain causes. I created the Amyloidosis Awareness team in late 2005 to help researchers find cures for protein folding diseases. Because of the support of many people, our team has been in the top 500 contributors to the project for the last 9 months.

There has been big news in the project lately. A client for the Playstation 3 gaming system was recently released, taking advantage of its powerful processors. It is said that the folding power of one Playstation 3 is equal to 30 home computers. Wow.

If you have a computer that you keep on all the time, why not do something useful with it? If you are interested in participating in our team, please contact me, visit our website, or click on one of the "Team Tony" links on the right-hand side of this page.