Project Overview

The project our team has chosen to work with is the Folding@Home project. This project is involved in helping to better understand how protein folding effects diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease, Cancer, Hunington's Disease, Parkinson's Disease and others. The Folding@Home project began in October of 2000 and currently has 200,000 participants. The project studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation (or clumping of proteins) and the related diseases. Proteins must take on a particular shape before they can begin their work. Before working in the body they assemble themselves into their desired shape, also known as "folding". When proteins misfold there can be serious side effects that can lead to these conditions. In working with this project we are hoping to participate in a global creation of large scale computational methods to simulate folding for the first time so that scientists can better examine and understand folding related diseases.