Has folding actually accomplished anything? *not a troll thread*

Sprayingmango

Sprayingmango

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 20, 2012
Messages
1,259
I am genuinely curious, has folding accomplished anything in the years that it's been around? What medical advances or discoveries has it directly impacted? Has it had any real, clinical impact or applications that have helped modern medicine?
 
trollphysics.jpg


I have covered up half of my holes
so
now I foldin faster
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Folding has increased my electricity bills for the past five years, deafened me with the sound of fans, thinned my wallet, and cluttered my home with boxen.
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Not that I know of...

I do believe it has saved a bunch of lab research time...

PS I did stay at a holiday in express last night, But what do I know?
 
Pocatello said:
trollphysics.jpg


I have covered up half of my holes
so
now I foldin faster
.
.
.
Folding has increased my electricity bills for the past five years, deafened me with the sound of fans, thinned my wallet, and cluttered my home with boxen.
.
.
.
Click to expand...

+1 to that. :D
 
One of the papers that came out..... 2 years ago? Identifed a misfold that resulted in altimeters. By knowing where the problem is. A drug can be made to prevent/cure this cause of altimeters. (There are a few from my understanding.)

Yes most of it has been on theroy..... but since we knew very little, this kind of data will help reasearchers for years to come..
 
Kendrak said:
One of the papers that came out..... 2 years ago? Identifed a misfold that resulted in altimeters. By knowing where the problem is. A drug can be made to prevent/cure this cause of altimeters. (There are a few from my understanding.)
Click to expand...

Protein misfolds result in altimeters?
 
Folding keeps me warm in the cold winter nights, so...... LOTS!
 
Another stupid question: Are folding results public domain? Or can they be patented?
 
Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?
Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution
(specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit
institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money
off of it. Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from
Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations
will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the
web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data,
the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on
this web site
Click to expand...
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/FoldingFAQ.pdf
 
Pocatello said:
trollphysics.jpg


I have covered up half of my holes
so
now I foldin faster
.
.
.
Folding has increased my electricity bills for the past five years, deafened me with the sound of fans, thinned my wallet, and cluttered my home with boxen.
.
.
.
Click to expand...

LOL nice.

Who doesn't love more boxen, right?
 
When you get down to the basics of why life works, we know astonishingly little. Most of biochemistry is based on predicting activity based on what's been observed, not knowing why. The simulations done with the folding project are bringing the understanding to a lower level. Take this example:

A car moves.
When I operate the controls, I can make the car move.
When I press the gas pedal, it causes the engine to make the car move.
An engine uses liquid fuel to release energy to make a car move.
Combustion is a chemical process that releases stored energy as heat.
.......

Each time you go to the next line, you understand at a more basic level what is happening and why. Folding is an attempt to bring our understanding to a lower level so that we can understand and influence it. It's a long road and we are far from the end of it.
 
The simulations done with the folding project are bringing the understanding to a lower level
Click to expand...
Well said.

We need to remember, Folding is basic research, performed at a level of precision and scope never undertaken before. Its purpose is to understand what's physically happening (protein folding characteristics under different conditions) at the molecular level. That understanding will provide highly accurate data useful for the applied science that others will execute.
 
W.Feather said:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers

they have 95 published papers based upon folding and its results to this date

I am pretty sure that alot of the work has been aimed more towards the theoretical side of distributed computing systems itself.
Click to expand...

Or in other words, it has accomplished a lot more than the games that those CPU and GPU cycles would have otherwise been wasted on. :D
 
It makes folders addicted ...... hard to quit .. like dope .. :D
 
Linden said:
Well said.

We need to remember, Folding is basic research, performed at a level of precision and scope never undertaken before. Its purpose is to understand what's physically happening (protein folding characteristics under different conditions) at the molecular level. That understanding will provide highly accurate data useful for the applied science that others will execute.
Click to expand...
You're correct, and thats why I often hestitate to sell F@H to others as being a project that is supposed to "cure cancer" or "prevent alzheimers", because ultimately I guess those are the goals, but the actual work that PG does is much more fundamental than that. That kind of stuff is more applied than PG's work. Its not even 100% about finding new mis-folds, quite a bit is about the method development and correlating the simulated results with observations so that others can use the same tools in the future. As someone who has to do scientific method development from time to time, I know its a huge time burden when all you want to do is work on the actual task at hand.

So folding has definitely accomplished some important things, between finding some actual protein mis-folds and developing a tool-kit and validating the concept for other researchers.
 
Alzheimer's, Influenza, Muscular Dystrophy, and Parkinsons, have all benefited from the knowledge gained by FAH. I believe there was a project studying a protein involved in childhood leukemia as well.

Is FAH finding a cure - absolutely not. But FAH is giving researchers (and yes it is available to researchers wold wide), the basic knowledge they can use to find better treatments and cures.

It's like peeling off an onion - you have to peel off a lot of layers before you reach the center (in this metaphor, the cures).

The study must be worthwhile, since the drug companies have been doing most of it, in the past, with limited resources (it's very expensive to do it on a super computer). Now that FAH has shown the way, there have been several more protein studies (both dc projects and national ones) start up, around the world.

The classical way to study this would be to use X-Ray crystallography. That's how they discovered the DNA structure. If you read through what's involved in x-ray crystallography, you realize it's massively time consuming, and prone to errors. (At that small level, the measurement of it, can significantly alter the molecule you're trying to study if you aren't very careful.)

Running it (whether it be movement as FAH tends to focus on, or a static position, as Rosetta and others focus upon), through a network of computers, is clearly the best way to go.

Research, especially medical research, needs to go slowly. Anything quicker endangers patients. But it builds and builds, and eventually you'll see cures discovered. It may come from FAH, type studies, or be based on a completely different approach to medical science. There is no way of knowing in advance, what will lead to the next breakthrough in medical research.

Either way, FAH will have given a showcase for an efficient and large dc for research purposes, and a huge amount of data highlighting some proteins dynamics.

In the late 1900's, we got rid of human smallpox - which is perhaps the biggest killer of humans, ever - even surpassing the Plague. Right now, we have a list of diseases that we intend to completely eradicate, and some (like malaria), that we are just going to decrease our losses from.

There IS a plan!

For a good read on the smallpox victory, read the excellent paperback "The Demon in the Freezer". You'll find out why the Indian Guru was throwing fruit at one of his best disciples' crotch! :rofl:
 
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