who created f@h?
“One of our project goals is to simulate protein folding in order to understand how proteins fold so quickly and reliably, and to learn about what happens when this process goes awry (when proteins misfold).” - Prof. Vijay Pande
F@H was initiated by Prof. Vijay Pande at the University of Stanford on the 1st October 2000. Since then there have been several achievements in better understanding diseases as the ones stated above. Slowly, we have seen folding becoming a part of our everyday life, and I do wish to see it being available on large amount of devices. It is something even a 10 year old child can contribute to without much difficulty.
What is f@H?
Folding at Home is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD) such as misfolding, and aggregation.
Folding at Home (commonly known as F@H) refers to the process of having the ability to fold proteins at the comfort of your own home. Proteins are a human body’s workforce, but for these proteins to work correctly and be functional the way they are supposed to they must first assemble themselves AKA: Fold. Protein folding is a very crucial part of our biology and till this day even with the advances of science and technology still remains mysterious. The process of protein Folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology. When a protein molecule does not fold correctly the entity in which the molecule exists becomes prone to diseases such as Cancer, Cancer related diseases, Huntington's and Alzheimer's.
When proteins misfold, they can cluster together ("aggregate"). These clusters can often manifest in the brain, where they are believed to cause the symptoms of Mad Cow or Alzheimer's disease.
How Does F@H Work?
While proteins self-assemble (fold) what is truly amazing is how they manage to do it so quickly, almost in the millionth of a second time frame. For a person, this is a scale of time too fast to even consider, but for computers it takes a very long time to simulate. To put theory into numbers, it takes a computer about a day to calculate a nanosecond (1 millionth of a second). A protein needs 10000 nanoseconds to fold completely, thus resulting in a computer needing 10000 days, or 30 years to simulate this folding, and that is an extremely long time period to wait for one single result. Just proves to show how remarkable the human organism really is, and this is why it has become a Distributed Computing (DC) project.
How to get involved
Getting involved is as easy as installing a program on your computer. Detailed Guides exist for all operating systems, be it Macintosh, Linux, or Windows. Installation takes a maximum of 7 minutes, and running it takes a simple click with your mouse. If you leave your computer on all night, why not contribute to finding a cure?