Folding@home

Folding@home is a distributed computing project from Stanford University in America. It allows lots of people to help in their research by donating computer processing power.

The client downloads small tasks from the University to complete. The power of the system is that there are so many computers working on these problems that the combined effect is far more effective than a supercomputer.

You may choose to set up a username so that your contribution can be tracked. This can be done on the download page http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Download This is not necessary as the username anonymous is possible.

It is worth bearing in mind that running software like this will keep your computer running at full pelt, which can lead to the computer getting hot, especially if it is a notebook. It will also use more electricity.

This is the description of the project from the homepage:

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology's workhorses - its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

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