Folding

Riggy

Riggy

Riggy

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Joined
1 Mar 2010
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290
Location
UK
Hello Guys,

Right, I'm quite new to the world of building your own pc, so as I've been researching my balls off for nearly 6 months trying to know everything. I have this wierd thirst for the knowledge. Along my 6 month long trip I've come across an activity called Folding. Now I've heard lots of things like this and always thought that it was just a gimmick, but it seems Folding is widespread and people go to the extreme of having folding farms.

I've been trying to understand what exactly the cycles are doing from my PC. I mean, how does my processing cycles contribute to determining the 3D structure of proteins? I'm stumped.

Could anyone direct me to a place where it dumb's the process down a little? From then, once I've got an idea I can research into it deeper to get a better understanding.

Thanks
 
Stanfords folding site has a lot of info on the projects running - the Pande group there orchestrate the entire thing.

The way i understand it (I could be completely wrong as i'm aerospace engineer and not a molecular biologist): in short proteins 'fold' into the lowest possible energy state - the shape where minimal energy is required to maintain the structure. This state is not obvious or easy to predict, varies with temperature and the environment the protein is in. The more atoms in the model - the more possible variations and hence the more complex the task.
The 'solution' is utilising a brute force / itterative method to model the process. the WUs itterate a set number of possible orientations of the structure and return the one with the lowest energy state and this is what stanford can post process for research/more WUs.
 
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Yeah sorry, I did wonder if it was the right thread. Thanks for your help man, I'll give it a look.

If this post could get moved please, I would greatly appreciate it :D
 
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