Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases



What is protein folding?
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.


Protein folding is linked to disease, such as Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers
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 scientists studying these diseases by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download
and run software to band together to make one of the largest
supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to
our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to
distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more
challenging than previously achieved.


What have we done so far?
We have had several successes. You can read about them on our Science page, on our Awards page, or go directly to our Results page.


the miracles of technology , i just wanted to share this because when i heard of it i was astounded by the advances in the technical field.

Ok.... wait... I'm not exactly sure I understand this yet. Are you saying that with this program, computers all over the globe can virtually network together? And once networked, they all work through a single problem at once? If this is the case, what or who, decides what is to be considered top priority research for this 'folding'? And what are the risks of opening your port up to this network?

lol we are all one big super computer, and everyone gets their own protein and their processor or graphics card folds the protein. and it brings little risk due to the fact that its using your internet to download the packets and all of that comes from their stanford university servers which are well protected due to their university technical professors. all the research is loaded on a server and is processed by their staff and students.

I have it. I don't have any risks of virus or such things. And if I can help them by using something that I use everyday to discover something new...then well I'm helping someone out wh omight need it more than me.

lmao yeah i want to know i did a good thing in my life :O

in my class ranking im one of the top contributers