What is folding?

[ObilvionNizer]

Hey guys,

 

As you can guess by the title, im would like to know what folding is. I see a lot of posts on it but i still dont know what it is and would like to learn about it.

 

All help explaining would be appreciated.

[AlwaysFSX]

 

 

Technically it's just running equations on your computer's hardware to solve them in a way.

[tobben]

you see science, it is a fantastic thing that let's us understand the world around us, how things work are put together and how they interact, lets us take advantage of them in all sorts of fantastic ways, folding is a distributed computing project, it means that you can help scientists doing calculations instead of running all these projects themselves, that would cost millions upon millions of dollars, instead they break the projects into smaller pieces and sends it to guys like me that do the calculations and send them back, this way they save alot of money giving them the opportunity to do things they would otherwise be incapable of while at the same time gaining a network that is faster than any centralised solution they could come up with, you are basicly helping scientists figuring out things by lending them your computational resources, all that by simply running a program on your computer.

 

folding is mainly aimed towards mapping out the various proteins and trying to find a solution to alzheimer cancer and all that nasty stuff, boinc is a collection of a whole bunch of different distributed projects, these can involve mathematics, physics, medical science, astronomy/space, astrophysics, you name it, all kinds of fantastic things.

 

that and read the faq in the very subsection of the forum that you posted in..

[Huginn]

Your body consists out of billions of proteins, all with different structures. You'll be folding proteins. Proteins have a primair, secondary, tertiary and quaternary structure. Primary being the orientation of the molecules, secondary the way they are folded, tertiary their 3d orientation and quaternary means if there are subsets. If a protein is folded incorrectly, it's a mutation which can cause terrible changes in the body. Folding@home basically test these folds, tries to understand the how and why so a cure can be found.

Small edit: Proteins are polypeptides, meaning they consist out of poly(multiple) peptides. Which can be very, VERY long.

 

Sorry for the rough explanation, english isn't my primary language. I'm a 1st year pharmacy student fyi ^-^