What is folding?

[Butterfish]

What is folding and what is the purpose of it? Even though i read some topics about it, i don't seem to understand it quite well. Can anyone explain me what it is? Thx in advance

 

cheers,

[naca1227]

You're basically letting a source harness the power of your computer. In this case it's usually scientists using it for a good cause, hooray. 

[Guest]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

everything (and beyond that) to know about F@H

Joust download the thing sing in the LTT Team and help scientists!

[AjAlien]

If you did a quick Google Search or went to their website you could have found out rather than posting but never the less.

Quoted from http://folding.stanford.edu/

"Help Stanford University scientists studying Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many cancers by simply running a piece of software on your computer. The problems we are trying to solve require so many calculations, we ask people to donate their unused computer power to crunch some of the numbers."

[SMURG]

Not sure how in-depth you want me to go with this, but I'm a second year biomedical science student with a keen interest in high-performance computing so...

Proteins (or polypeptides) are formed of a chain of amino acids, and every protein will fold into a specific shape depending on the amino acids and their order. Folding@home is a distributed computing project that simulates how different sequences will fold into their final 3D structure - each computer contributing to it gets a small part of the algorithm to work on, until a complete model of the particular protein is formed. This is then repeated for thousands of sequences so that scientists (like me I guess lol) have models to work with when it comes to finding a protein to perform a specific function.

Since a protein's function is dependent on how it interacts with other molecules, and this is in turn dependent on its shape (among other things), determining the 3D structure of a polypeptide without having to actually synthesise it and physically look at its crystalline structure can be helpful. Ofc, searching for a "cure" this way is still like searching for a needle in a haystack, but it's more helpful than it is a hindrance.

[helping]

What is folding and what is the purpose of it? Even though i read some topics about it, i don't seem to understand it quite well. Can anyone explain me what it is? Thx in advance

 

cheers,

From my understanding it simulates protein folding which requires a lot of calculation work any many attempts to perform correctly and find solutions that help in discovering medical advancements. 

[Butterfish]

Woaw, Thanks everyone. I understand it much better now