http://fold.it/portal/
http://folding.stanford.edu/
Basically both these projects are working on something called the protein folding problem. Proteins are the molecular machines that are involved in just about every conceivable job in your body. They replicate DNA, hold your joints together, fight infect, you name it they do it.
Not only are proteins amazingly useful but they are also fabulously beautiful structures. These two images show the structure of two very different proteins. The first one is called catalase and it mops up harmful hydrogen peroxide that your cells make as a waste product of metabolism. The one below is called rhodopsin and it is produced in the cells on the retinal at the back of your eyes, its sensitive to light and acts like the film in a camera.
The thing is that proteins are all made up of just 20 different building blocks called amino acids. These amino acids fit together to form a long chain, just like beads on a string. For a protein to do its job this string of amino acids needs to fold up in exactly the right way. The astonishing thing is that there are more ways that a protein can fold than there are atoms in the Universe. But somehow proteins 'know' which 'fold' is correct and how to get there in fractions of a second. Its sort of like throwing all the pieces of a complex robot into the air and expecting them to land as a fully functioning machine.
So how do proteins do it? Well the short answer is we really don't know. Despite a massive amount of computer power we still aren't very good at predicting how proteins fold. And thats were you come in. Because the fold@home project lets you run protein folding simulations on your desktop PC or Playstation. You might think that this won't make much of a difference, but over 5 million home computers all round the world are running fold@home and together they make up the second most powerful computer on the planet.
The fold.it game takes another tack. The idea here is to get people to play with proteins and get them to fold. Then scientists look at the strategies that gamers used. They then take this information and input it into computer algorithms. Nice idea and really quite successful, they and their gamers have published their findings in the most prodigious scientific journals (http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf).
It's quite an interesting fact and I was just wondering how do these geniuses in the medical field manage to figure out that there's such a thing as protein folding. Well, as long as, it doesn't affect our overall well-being then the process we are all be fine, right?
ReplyDeleteThat's just it, sometimes protein folding does go wrong. And it can lead to a whole host of diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and CJD, to name but a few.
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