The Longevity Meme Folding@Home team members continue to make progress in the team rankings; well done all! We hit rank 300 only a few short months ago, and now the team has almost made it to the 250 mark.

As you may recall, I sent around some momentos when the team hit rank 500 last year. I'll do it again at rank 200, so consider that an incentive and challenge - sign up for the team and get folding for better biotechnology and medical science!

Better your spare computer cycles are going towards solving problems in medicine and biotechnology than sitting unused - so join our team and do that little bit more to help push science forward:

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.

You'll find more information on results to date from the Folding@Home project at their website, such as those for some of the biochemistry of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease.

We have many calculations being performed on AD. Our primary goals are the prediction of AD aggregate structure for rational drug design approaches as well as further insight into how AD aggregates form kinetically (hopefully paving the way for a method to stop the AD aggregate formation).

Some of the team members keep a thread going at the Immortality Insitute forum; drop by and say hello if you plan to download the Folding@Home client and help.

Technorati tags: activism, bioinformatics, Folding@Home

Posted by Reason at October 16, 2006 8:58 PM | TrackBack (0)