New Folding@Home Team - Project Tweakers (Team #63)

[bmint]

Guys sorry to be a pain but what do you mean by the term 'folding'?

Is it a programme that you use?

[atocp]

The term folding i think mearly refers to what the program actually does. This is more biology than computing. When proteins are created (right down to the strings of amino acids) they are created in what is more or less a straight line. This however cannot be properly utilised by organic systems, and therefore a different structure has to be adopted. Folding is what proteins do for this, and the reason that this is so important is that differently folded proteins interact with different organic and inorganic molecules differently. Im impressed im using the word 'different' so often.

In other words...think of a piece of string. Thats your amino acid chain. Scrunch it up into a mixed up ball and thats your protein. Now twist it and scrunch it up in a different way, and you have a different shaped protein. Different folds means different interactions, which means many things for drug interactions.

So in closing. Folding@Home is a program that computes proteins folding in different ways.

Hope that helps.



also...just noticed this link on the project tweakers page, it goes a wee bit more in depth... http://www.project-tweakers.com/html/team/about.html