Change the world in your spare time!

Most of us check our email using what a few decades ago would have been considered supercomputers. That laptop or desktop computer is probably being under utilized as you type your newsletter. Some clever people have figured out ways to harness the unused computational power on your machine to help solve some difficult medical research problems. I have discovered 3 such projects you may want to donate some processing power to. They are described below:


1. Folding@home:

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 can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.
http://folding.stanford.edu



2. Genome@home

Our partner project, Folding@home, is striving to understand how existing proteins attain their specific, functional three-dimensional structures. The goal of Genome@home is to design new genes that can form working proteins in the cell. Genome@home uses a computer algorithm (SPA), based on the physical and biochemical rules by which genes and proteins behave, to design new proteins (and hence new genes) that have not been found in nature. By comparing these "virtual genomes" to those found in nature, we can gain a much better understanding of how natural genomes have evolved and how natural genes and proteins work. Some important applications of the Genome@home virtual genome protein design database:

-Engineering new proteins for medical therapy
-Designing new pharmaceuticals
-Assigning functions to the dozens of new genes being sequenced every day
-Understanding protein evolution

To design these large numbers of protein sequences, we need lots of computers. By running the Genome@home protein sequence design client, you can lend us your computer while you're not using it, for as long or as little as you like. ...A day or two's worth of running Genome@home is enough to design new protein sequences that the world has never seen before. All the sequences get added to the Genome@home database, so every little bit helps.
http://genomeathome.stanford.edu/


3. FightAids@home:

Now more than ever, your help is needed in the fight against AIDS. In the mid 1980's, HIV infections exploded and have continued to rise at alarming rates. Nearly twenty years later, technology has reached a point where you can make a difference by contributing the idle processing time of your computer.
http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/help.html