Hello crunchers,

We've made significant progress on many fronts of the HPF project in the last few months. Much of the progress is a result of the grid continuing to grow (thanks to you guys and girls) and more and more work units being returned at a break-neck speed. A few tests still need to be run but it appears the FIRST folding portion of the malaria dataset is complete. This is a fantastic achievement in the given amount of time. Gram-negative organisms are being crunched now and results from these calculations will clue researchers into the function of many functionally-unknown proteins in some of the worlds nastiest bugs.

While you have been hard at work so have we. Some excellent progress has been made in combining the results from the grid with the limited information we know about specific proteins. This is starting to uncover and refine the global picture of these individual proteins. Work still needs to be done however but preliminary results are promising and we'll be sure to update you with more of the details of the method in the future.

Another front we have made significant progress on is the web interface and backend of our database. Many of the advancements have been "behind the scenes" advancements so they're not as obvious to users immediately but they will be evident once the database is in full use. Lars has been hard at work refactoring the database to increase speed of querying, increasing ability in compiling result summaries of full genomes and making the database easier to maintain.

Also, Mike has been working on some of the more obvious enhancements to the web interface including a new search page which allows researchers to search by a specific organism, GO annotation or GO evidence code. These "searchables" are common to many web based data sets and therefore users will already be familiar with the layout. Also, these additions will be very useful to first time users and will allow all users to go from a set of genes they are interested in to a set of predicted functions with just a few clicks.
Search Form (note: currently only Saccharomyces cerevisiae is uploaded to the database).

Again, we appreciate all of your compute cycles and your interest in our research.