It’s a Race! The Great Chimp Challenge 2012

May is upon us, and in the Spring a young man’s mind turns to… you guessed it, the Great Chimp Challenge team folding race!

Like every Chimp Challenge, the purpose is not merely to race. We use the race to introduce people to the Folding@Home project. The proteins we study are not easily understood by non-researchers, but everybody understands a rousing race. If you would like to join us in this race (and I hope you do!), here’s what you’ll need to know:

Who: YOU!

What: The Great Chimp Challenge Team Folding Race.

Purpose: To have fun, and expose more people to the Folding@Home distributed computing project.

When: May 15th – May 25th, Noon to Noon, Pacific Daylight Time (UTC -7)

How: Download the folding client program for your operating system, and run it, with the following case sensitive information:

Folding name: T32monkeys
Team Number: 32
Passkey: 3311d92fd7ee331bd66dfe6eea01708b

For lots more information, help, and frequent updates on the progress of the race, join us in the Folding team’s forum.

The programs and work units we run come only from Professor Pande’s group, headquarted at Stanford University. Diseases studied vary widely but include Cancer, Alzheimer, Influenza, Huntington’s Disease, and the human variant of Mad Cow Disease (CJD). The research is available to any medical researcher worldwide. Most recently, the data was used to increase the effectiveness of a breast cancer killing drug, while decreasing it’s toxicity. If you think of our proteins as little locks and keys, it’s easy to understand that if the locks or keys are shaped wrong a disease will be the result. The locks will be jammed, the keys become useless. Either one may become poisonous (Video of a Protein folding).

So come one, come all and join a top Folding @ Home team race for a cure and for a win in the Great Chimp Challenge!

~Adak