Protein Folding

Every part of your body is made up of proteins or manufactured by proteins. During the manufacture of a protein molecule, it "folds" into a characteristic shape necessary to perform its job.

When something goes wrong with this "protein folding" process, numerous infectious, hereditary, and degenerative diseases can result. Misfolded proteins have been implicated in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cystic Fibrosis, Huntington’s Disease, kuru, scrapie, BSE (mad cow disease), vCJD (mad cow in humans), Huntington's Disease, cancer, and many other infectious, hereditary, and degenerative diseases.

You can do something to advance research in this field by donating your unused computer time to a distributed computing project. It is easy to do, and costs you little or nothing.

This document is our attempt to explain protein folding in simple language that everybody can understand. (RTF format)
If you get all the way through it, and still don't understand what protein folding is, or how you can help solve this medical mystery, please contact us so we can improve the document!
"Distributed computing" involves running a special "screen saver" program. When your computer is not in use, the screen saver performs computations to help solve the protein folding problem.
Distributed computing projects researching misfolded proteins:
- Stanford University's "folding@home" project resides at http://folding.stanford.edu
  They have versions of their program that run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The program is easy to download and use – I have it up and running on a Mac Mini and an IBM Windows box, and it only took a couple of minutes to do.
  If you care to join our team, it is identified by team=Wolfstone, team number=46090.
- World Community Grid is at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org . It operates a number of distributed computing projects that seek to benefit humanity.
  You can find information about their protein-folding project at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/viewHpfAbout.do .
  If you would like to join Scott's team, please check out the United Grid Monkeys .
Thank you for visiting. Your comments are welcome.
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