This news may be of interest to contributors to both BOINC and Folding@home. It is not the often-requested integration of Folding@home into the BOINC system, merely complementary work on both platforms.The project of interest is Rosetta@home, run by David Baker's laboratory at the University of Washington. R@h's goal is to predict the three-dimensional structure of the proteins it studies. The approach used is to test, by studying the energy of the molecular structures, the stability of various forms of the molecule, and predict which form is most likely to be stable.
TJ Lane tells us that the Pande Group is using some of Rosetta@home's results as the basis for some Folding@home projects. Rosetta provides the most likely structure, but without further analysis it is not known for definite whether this is the form the molecule takes, or even if that form is viable. TJ's projects model the predicted forms in Gromacs and then test them through the Molecular Dynamics simulations that all Folding@home projects use, to attempt to verify Rosetta's results. Additionally, Folding@home's methods allow for additional information to be gathered at the atomic level, along with detail on the methods that allow the molecule to change from one form to another.
Rosetta@home is therefore a starting point for TJ's research, focussing on those results most useful in relation to other Folding@home research. The projects referred to in this article are those in the 7600 series.
Source: Folding Forum
jmn
On: 07/29/11
