Asklemmy

43889 readers

767 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Has any scientific breakthrough come out of the Folding@Home project? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

22 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I probably donated 10 years of idle CPU time between 2005 to 2015.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It's basically a software you install to donate your computer's idle power (ie typicallywhen the CPU does nothing) to help scientists with the huge amount of calculations that simulating the folding of protein requires and that not even the best supercomputers can achieve alone in a reasonable time. It's distributed science. I'll admit I still don't grasp what folding means in the context of proteins. The programme folding@home started around 2000 and is still running ie you can still donate CPU time today

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Does it work on linux?

Edit: checked for myself, it does. Has a .deb too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

A protein is like a really long chain of simple monomers (amino acids), that you can think of as a long string of differently coloured beads. The ordering of the beads somewhat determines how the protein functions, but the major factor that determines it is how this long string is bundled up, i.e. "folded" (think of a ball of yarn).

A DNA sequence tells us the sequence of the amino acids in a protein, but tells us nothing about how it is folded. It is of great interest to compute how a protein will fold, given its sequence, because then we can determine how and why it works like it does, and use gene-editing techniques to design proteins to do the stuff we want. This requires huge amounts of computational power, so you get the fold@home project :)

Thanks for contributing!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Thank you for enlightening on the folding aspect!