this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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It's basically a software you install to donate your computer's idle power (ie typicallywhen the CPU does nothing) to help scientists with the huge amount of calculations that simulating the folding of protein requires and that not even the best supercomputers can achieve alone in a reasonable time. It's distributed science. I'll admit I still don't grasp what folding means in the context of proteins. The programme folding@home started around 2000 and is still running ie you can still donate CPU time today
Does it work on linux?
Edit: checked for myself, it does. Has a .deb too
A protein is like a really long chain of simple monomers (amino acids), that you can think of as a long string of differently coloured beads. The ordering of the beads somewhat determines how the protein functions, but the major factor that determines it is how this long string is bundled up, i.e. "folded" (think of a ball of yarn).
A DNA sequence tells us the sequence of the amino acids in a protein, but tells us nothing about how it is folded. It is of great interest to compute how a protein will fold, given its sequence, because then we can determine how and why it works like it does, and use gene-editing techniques to design proteins to do the stuff we want. This requires huge amounts of computational power, so you get the fold@home project :)
Thanks for contributing!
Thank you for enlightening on the folding aspect!