Protein Folding

Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they assemble themselves, or 'fold' and yet the process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Not surprisingly when proteins do not fold correctly there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.

Folding@Home

Folding@Home (folding.stanford.edu) is the first 'distributed computing' project that has led to a research paper published in a top scientific journal. Its aim is to use the spare computational power of thousands of computers to simulate the way proteins are made.

Understanding how proteins fold will likely have a great impact on understanding a wide range of diseases and although Protein S Deficiency is not yet singled out for any special attention by the Folding@Home project it is nevertheless very significant that Protein Science is being advanced in such a novel and successful way.

How to Participate

You can support this research effort by running a program on your computer. It is designed to run as a screensaver (or in the background) so that the number crunching is done when you aren't busy and when the computer would otherwise be idle. It is quick to download and install and afterwards requires very little time for maintenance. It can automatically send the results of your folding simulations back to the team at Stanford University and pick up the next assignment.

The software is available free of charge for Mac OS X, Linux, Free-BSD, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP and can be downloaded from http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

Join the Team

After you have installed the software you can join the Protein S Deficiency Team

Our team number is '11449' (enter this in your settings)
Our team name is 'Protein S Deficiency'

We have our own Team Page and a Fast Stats Page hosted on the Stanford University web server.

Useful Links

Download (don't forget to use our team number = 11449)

http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

Folding at Home

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Folding Support Forum

Screensavers crack medical puzzle (22 Oct 2002)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2349247.stm

Absolute comparison of simulated and experimental protein-folding dynamics: Christopher D. Snow, Houbi Nguyen, Vijay S. Pande & Martin Gruebele

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature01160

About The Pande Group

The Pande Group works on theory and simulations of how proteins, RNA, and nanoscale synthetic polymers fold. They developed the ensemble dynamics method and its application to protein folding and wrote the client and server code for the Folding@home project. Vijay S Pande is Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Assistant Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University.

Vijay has sent us an email to thank us for our support. Thank you Vijay and keep up the good work!

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