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When will the folding be done?

E

Elledan

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2010
Joined
Oct 18, 2001
Messages
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Has there been any indication from Stanford or anyone else for that matter about how the F@H project is progressing? Are we at 5% of all possible simulations, or 10%, or even just 0.1%?

I tried finding any kind of indication but without luck, thus I turn to the community :) It's not that I'm impatient or anything, just curious.

So, anyone got a clue?
 
Unlike a simple mathematical calculation such as RC5-72, fully understanding protein folding/mis-folding may never have a true end. Proteins vary greatly in complexity and many are unique to each type of disease. I don't think it is possible to answer your question in the way you are asking or looking for in an answer. :)
 
I would anticipate that as long as there are medial issues out there that will benefit from mathmatical data being processed, the answer would be never. Analyzing the data for protiens and how they fold (or mis-fold) is just one step towards finding a solution. There are many other applications for the DC concept, and F@H is just one path to solving the many issues that are being researched and analyzed.
 
The project does not work like that. As far as I understand it, they basically try various folding algorithms, which accounts for the various projects you see, and they take whichever result is closest to the experimentally observed result, fine-tune that, and then try again. It's not as simple as giving a progress indication, because there are no indicators to base the progress on. The current set of projects only cover a very, very small proportion of proteins in the human body, most of which can suffer disease-causing mutations. So realistically, we have a long, long way to go.
 
Mr. Pedantic said:
So realistically, we have a long, long way to go.
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I guess that's the short version of it all, yeah. Until we find the perfect algorithm to predict (mis)folding with, it's still heavily experimental.
 
It is estimated that the human body may contain over two million proteins, coded for by only 20,000 - 25,000 genes. The total number of proteins found in terran biological organisms is likely to exceed ten million, but nobody knows for sure. We have data on just over a million proteins, taken mainly from information found in the ~100 genomes which have been fully sequenced as of 2007.
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I believe F@H has concentrated on just a few of the smaller, more likely to misfold proteins. Each WU is just a small part of a much larger calculation. Even with the larger SMP units, they are not a full calculation.

In 2000-2001, we have folded several small, fast folding proteins, with experimental validation of our method. We are now working to further develop our method, and to apply it to more complex and interesting proteins and protein folding and misfolding questions. Since then (2002-2006), Folding@Home has studied more complex proteins, reporting on the folding of many proteins on the microsecond timescale, including BBA5, the villin headpiece, Trp Cage, among others.
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Very interesting overview, [H]ugh_Freak :) What's the source?
 
http://www.wisegeek.com/how-many-proteins-exist.htm

I would presume a lot of those proteins are antibodies, which are created from random mixing of preconfigured elements to create several hundred thousand different combinations of binding sites to allow specificity for various bacteria and viruses. Other than that, different proteins coded by the same gene are produced by control of expression mechanisms and start/stop codons.
 
Do you know whether Stanford ever released an in-depth article on their approach to F@H? :)
 
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