Folding@home is a distributed computing project that was launched in October 2000. Now, 20 years later, F@H has become the most powerful computer on the earth. This supercomputer maintained by thousands of citizen scientists to perform biomolecular research, discover pathogenesis, find possible treatments. Project statistic can be found as follows:
What is the Protein Folding and why this is important?
Protein folding = process of formation of 3D structure from a single 1D chain of amino acids (which is synthesed in the cell or in vitro).
Even if we know 1D structure of protein, physico-chemical properties of amino acids and their order in the polipetic chain, we can not predict 3D structure and function of a protein. An expensive crystallographic analysis is needed instead.
Some of proteins, mostly membrane ones, can not be easily crysrallized. 3D structures of proteins are collected in the Protein Databank and we do not have knowledge about 3D structures of all know proteins. Neither can we write down 1D sequence for required structure and function.
Knowing 3D structure of proteins is important to understand normal and pathological processes in cells, develope new treatments of the diseases.
Is folding@home project to predict how protein folds into 3D structure?
Not necessary. F@H may have tasks to simulate protein dynamics, for proteins with known 3D structure and search for possible molecular interactions and possible therapeultic leads. Example can be Covid-19 tasks to simulate virus infection and find possible drugs.
Why such advanced computations are needed? Can all the required computations be done in future?
Imagine chess game. There is 8×8 chessboard, 16 pieces of 6 types for each player.
Regular protein sequence is about 300 amino acids in the sequence (like 300×300), there are 20 amino acids with different properties, each amino acid consist of many atoms with know position in crystal structure.
It is clear this is not possible to compute all possible interactions between proteins or proteins with molecules.
What is possible to compute and does it make sense to join Folding@home project, donate computer power to science?
There are 225 scientific papers published by F@H project. List of publications is below.
https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/
Last publication on Covid-19 is published in June 2020 and being updated with new data:
https://foldingathome.org/papers-results/
While I am writing this post, my laptop computes Covid-19 project from swedish research group.
Joining F@H is easy and all instructions are here: https://foldingathome.org/
I have more articles on citizen science with F@H or BOINC here: https://read.cash/c/citizenscience-with-boinc-8cf5
Wow you have done a great job Proteins is relevant in body system which enhance proper growth