Hello World Community Grid Members,

The Help Conquer Cancer status report for April 2009 is ready. The full report is here.

This month marks a milestone in Help Conquer Cancer: 25% of our work units have been processed on the Grid, representing 3 million crystallization trials on over 2,000 proteins. Analysis of these results is proceeding on multiple fronts. Our latest crystal-finding classifier, generated from HCC results, can identify 4 out of 5 images containing protein crystals, greatly reducing the effort of manually searching through images for crystals, and thereby increasing the rate of protein structure solution. Using this classifier on a set of 5.7 million images, we recently identified 11 proteins with favourable crystallization conditions, all of which are homologous to human proteins on our cancer target list (spanning lung, ovarian, prostate and head & neck cancers). Finding crystallization conditions clears one hurdle on the path to determining the structure, and ultimately the function, of these cancer targets.

Thank you all for your contributions to HCC and to the World Community Grid -- they make this research possible.

Christian

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Christian A. Cumbaa, Research Associate
Ontario Cancer Institute