Folding@home is a most powerful computer in the world, run by the citizen scientists. This project started 20 years ago in October 2000.
Starting to compute for science with F@H is easy, installation is straight forward and described at F@H homepage.
F@H provides additional scientific information on every computed task. This is what I am a little bit missing with BOINC.
The project description can be used for self education, maybe for school projects about science. This may be good to attract pupils to science. Let us see a description of the project that my laptop was recently solving.
https://stats.foldingathome.org/project?p=16423
Project 16423 relates to a Covid-19 research and the info we see us this:
There is a reference to the institution and a lab performing this research. More info and publications may found on their webpage or pubmed.
Short description of the study.
Sometimes there are links to YouTube videos.
So I know that my computer does a simulation of a non-structural protein of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 virus is an RNA virus and NSPropein relates to it's function, not it's structure. Viruses are using host cell molecular machine to replicate itself and continue with infection. This is why knowing function on these proteins are so important to science and possible cure of the disease. For example, to develope some drugs to bind virus proteins.
Why simulation is so complex and require some help from citizen scientists? I tried to explain it in earlier post: https://read.cash/@Swca.ch/protein-folding-and-citizen-science-08380ec1
Another project that was recently computed on my laptop is a neuroscience project 16917. In this study description, there are more details and links to scientific articles on the topic.
https://stats.foldingathome.org/project?p=16917
The conclusion that I like to make with this post is that F@H is a great education resource. This can also attract schoolers to science.
Start folding here:
This is why knowing function on these proteins are so important to science and possible cure of the disease. For example, to develope some drug.