The DU Folding@Home team has moved up to #261 with a score of 15.42 million

[Agony]

I am a rank newcomer to FaH (Folding@Home), I've been folding for about 2 weeks now. There are 322 members of the Democratic Underground FaH Team, some active, some not.

55772 work units processed! Since? Anybody know when the DU team was started?

What is FaH? From folding.stanford.edu

Our goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases
What are proteins and why do they "fold"? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out their biochemical function, they remarkably assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, remains a mystery. Moreover, perhaps not surprisingly, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious effects, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease.

What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.

Video interview about Folding@Home, Prof. Pande explains the process of a folded protein --->http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ1XuOgknuE&feature=fvw

I am running FaH on OS X 10.5 using the InCrease client from calxalot.net. Currently processing work units for the following project.
Project 2670 p2670_IBX in water
These projects study how influenza virus recognizes and infects cells. We are developing new simulation methods to better understand these processes.
Project summary page--->http://fah-web.stanford.edu/psummary.html

Cheerio!
Agony

[SheilaT]

1. Folding at home made me think

you were folding laundry.

Whatever happend to the Seti project?

[Agony]

2. Except that I usually wad my laundry in a ball... no folding involved.

Yeah! I used to run SETI too! hmmm, FaH seems more useful than searching for ET.

[Agony]

3. Moved up another notch to #260 and 15.47 million

Main page at Stanford ---> http://folding.stanford.edu/
OS X InCrease client page ---> http://calxalot.net/InCrease/