World Community Grid is pleased to launch the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project for Association Francaise contre les Myopathies (AFM) in Paris, France. In order to understand how proteins perform their necessary functions in living cells, a better and more detailed understanding of function and protein-protein interactions is required, to ultimately help researchers to design therapeutic strategies. Your contribution will provide valuable information to the research that is part of the Decrypthon Program. Eventually your contribution will benefit all researchers working on many genetic diseases, particularly neuromuscular diseases. The ultimate hope is that this will help scientists develop innovative therapies that will lead to treatment for the vast majority of neuromuscular diseases, including Muscular Dystrophy. For more detailed information and frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the project, please press the Research button in the upper navigation bar or click here.

This project is slightly different than most of our other projects in that what we are launching is only Phase 1 of a larger project. We anticipate that Phase 1 will run for approximately 2 months. Then the researchers will examine the results in preparation for running Phase 2, which will run for a significantly longer period of time. Early estimates are that Phase 2 may start around August of 2007. Because Phase 1 runs for such a short time, we did not expend the resources required to run the project on both the UD and BOINC platforms. Thus, we are running Phase 1 using only the UD agent and will run Phase 2 on UD and BOINC. We know that this may disappoint some members who run BOINC but we hope that you can understand that preparing the software for a project takes two to three months and when the project (Phase 1) is only 2 months long, it doesn’t make sense to run the project on all platforms.

In addition to providing information about this project, we have created a forum for discussions about the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project. To participate in this forum, please press the Forums button in the upper navigation bar or click here. Only forum authors with the title "Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy Scientist" are authorized to comment as representatives of the research organizations for this project.

The Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project is one of five projects running on World Community Grid at this time. The other projects include FightAIDS@Home, which has been running since November of 2005, Help Defeat Cancer, which has been running since July of 2006, Human Proteome Folding Phase 2, which has been running since October of 2006, and Fiocruz Genome Comparison, which has been running since November 17, 2006. For more detailed information and FAQs about each of these projects, please press the Research button in the upper navigation bar or click here. We thank all of our members for their valuable contributions to these projects and hope you will continue to help process all five projects.

Because there are five research projects running on World Community Grid, your grid agent could receive work units from any of the projects. You may elect to focus your computer's time on only particular projects, if you have a preference. To do so, sign into the site and press the My Grid button in the upper navigation bar and select My Projects or click here.

If you are already a member of World Community Grid, there's nothing that you have to do to prepare for the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project. The next time your grid agent communicates with the servers, it will send you a work unit from one of the projects at random for which your machine meets the minimum requirements and according to your project participation elections. To know which project you are running, please double-click on the World Community Grid icon (or BOINC Manager icon if you are running BOINC) in the system tray, and you will see the title of the project in the display.

If you have any questions, World Community Grid provides you with four methods of obtaining assistance: (1) Review the FAQs found in the Help section of the website, (2) Review the forums to see if anyone has asked/answered the question that you have, (3) Ask the question in an appropriate World Community Grid forum found and a Community Advisor or a more experienced member will provide an answer, and (4) Send an email to the support desk from the Contact Us link found at the bottom of every page on the website.

We thank you for your run time contribution to the Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy project as well as all of our other projects.