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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.
Then further explained:
You can help by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
So essentially you join thousands of people/computers throughout the world and work closer to a cure for numerous diseases' such as those previously stated. I have the program and have taken a few screenshots to show you how awesome it is:
If you want to download it, it can be accessed here.
When you are in the properties window (which is set up when you first start the program) you can enter my team number, which is 113197 or find another team to support.
There is also a non-graphic version of the program that is text-based for computers that run slower.
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