Has folding paid off yet?

I am not questioning the ethics of folding one bit. I love folding, and I love folding for the cause. Im not questioning anything, but more like wondering. Has our folding gotten anything done yet? I ran a quick search-but realized I don't really know what to search for? Have us folding contributed to the cure of any cancers or the like yet? Of course I realize that computers helping find these things just started, so probably not yet. Thanks for any links.

check out these two pages:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/results.html

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/papers.html




Fold on!!!!

Kendan said:

check out these two pages:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/results.html

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/papers.html




Fold on!!!!

Click to expand...

Hey thanks alot! Should have looked here.

So, even though our computers run at Ghz, and we have thousands and thousands of Ghz, we are only computing one single protein? I don't mean to make it sound like a bad thing, but if that is the case-I am in awe of how large proteins are.

Proteins are actually very very tiny, but their actions and makeup and incredibly complex. So we have THz and THz of power to break it down into the simpler stuff.

So basically we are breaking a super complicated math problem, and breaking it down into smaller steps, so a 5th grader could understand it?

Every time your PC folds a protein, it gives them a "Simulation" of how the protein would react in a certain situation. Because proteins act diferently many times, you need to run many, many simulations over and over again to see the probability of something happening. Because there are so many proteins and each protein needs to be folded many times and in different situations, we have a extremely large amount of folding work to be done.

I'll give you an example: We know that if you rolled 2 dice, the most common number that would come up if you added them together would be the number "7". (3+4= 7...4+3=7...2+5=7...5+2=7...1+6=7...6+1=7) Does this mean that if you rolled a pair of dice, that you would get the number 7 every time? No... You could get a 10 first roll, a 3 the next, a 4 next and so on. You could probably roll 20 times and not see a number 7 at all. (I have seen this a few times luckily in Vegas...then I blew all my money later on...UGH) Anyway if you rolled a pair of dice 1,000 times, you would find that the number 7 would come up the most way more than any other number. Also, if you ran a computer simulation that had 2 dice rolling over and over again, you would find that 7 is the most common and that is pretty much what we do.

Folding is much the same way. The proteins do not fold the way we think they are supposed to every time. Like the pair of dice I spoke of, we need to run the simulation many times to find out what the most common way a a certain protein folds and also, what happens to it when it "MisFolds".

ahh ha very interesting. I dident know before exactley what were doing but now I do. thanks guys