I'll get right on that for you.

That´s right

Research News & Updates

This is the basic foundation research which is being done. This is the kind of knowledge upon which others will build to eventually produce a product or process which may have an impact on some mechanism of a disease to slow it or cure it.

As an analogy think about the research into better types of concrete. It may take years to find the correct mixes of sand,gravel,limestone, etc. to get the properties desired. but then a lot of others need to come along and add their expertise such as architects and engineers to design a structure, various craftsmen to build and finish it and finally the end users to utilize the function of the structure. The concrete is only one piece of the total input to making the structure function as a whole. It is a part of the larger item along with many other materials.

This research is like the research into better concrete. Who knows what others will build from this knowledge, yet without it and a lot of other research pieces we will not have foundation to get to the next level to find the cures we are seeking.

This is long term research. Cures or drugs or treatments are not right around the corner in the next couple of years (unless we are very lucky). Think out 10, 20 or longer years to see the fruits of this labor.


Cheers

So, O.K. You are not convinced from the above comments.

Go to http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp. Look in research at Completed Projects.

If not, here is an analogy, in terms of USA Baseball, and then four examples

In Baseball, there is the Middle or Long Reliever. He rarely gets the win or loss, or really any important "stats". He might preserve the win for the Starter, he might get the team to the Closer who might get the "Save".

WCG is the Long Reliever. Lab science projects come up with the questions, and design research. That research might be beyond the lifetimes of the lab scientists. WCG projects cut literally tens of thousands of hours off the time to get to the end results, but we will not be the guys who get those results. That will be, again, the lab scientists, maybe different personnel than those who started.

Now:

Influenza:

World Community Grid is pleased to announce that as a result of the generous contribution of computing power from our members, Phase 1 of The Influenza Antiviral Drug Search project finished on October 22, 2009.

The project launched on May 5, 2009. During that time over 67,000 members processed over 3 million results which required almost 3,000 years of computing power from about 150,000 computers.

As part of ending Phase 1 of the project, it has been moved from Active Research to Completed Research on the Research pages and in the Forums.

Utilizing a program called AutoDock, Phase 1 of this project was designed to screen about 3 million compounds for their possible interaction with proteins required by strains of the influenza virus (including drug resistant strains and H1N1) to replicate and spread in the body. About 2,000 of the most promising candidates will be further screened in Phase 2 to eliminate many false positives.


Clean Energy:

World Community Grid is pleased to announce that as a result of the generous contribution of computing power from our members, Phase 1 of The Clean Energy Project finished on October 13, 2009.

The project launched on December 5, 2008 and ran for less than a year. During that time over 57,000 members processed almost 2 million results which required over 2,000 years of computing power from over 121,000 computers.

With the completion of this project, our members have significantly contributed to the research of discovering new materials that efficiently harvest solar radiation for the next generation of solar cells. This research information has helped determine which materials are most promising for developing affordable solar energy technology. This same research would have taken 22 years to complete on a regular scientific cluster.

Phase 1 was designed to perform molecular mechanics calculations: Some of the computers contributing to the Clean Energy Project are carrying out molecular mechanics calculations of molecular crystals, thin films and molecular and polymer blends to study the packing arrangements and for predicting charge and excitation energy transport properties of the candidate materials. These calculations will be carried out using the CHARMM molecular mechanics package developed by the Karplus group at Harvard University.

Phase 2 of the project will perform electronic structure calculations: To obtain the relevant optical and electronic transport properties, some of the computers connected to the Clean Energy Project will be computing calculations using wave function methods (such as Hartree-Fock or second-order perturbation theory) and density functional theory. These calculations will help researchers build a database of molecular properties that together with the results of the molecular mechanics calculations will help us identify potential candidate materials. The electronic structure calculations will be performed with the Q-Chem quantum chemistry code, developed by Q-Chem, Inc.

At this time, the researchers are busy performing post-processing on the results from Phase 1 and are preparing for Phase 2. You may read about these plans and get the latest update from The Clean Energy Project Scientists in this forum thread .

Dengue Fever:

World Community Grid is pleased to announce that as a result of the immense contribution of computing power from our members, Phase 1 of the Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together project finished on August 11, 2009.

The project launched on August 21, 2007 and ran for nearly 2 years. During that time over 159,000 members processed more than 25,500,000 results which required nearly 12,000 years of computing power from about 400,000 computers.

The project was interrupted for 17 weeks when Hurricane Ike made landfall in Galveston, Texas, USA, on September 17, 2008 and significantly damaged the research facility. Fortunately, none of the members of the research team and their families were injured and the facility was put back in working order. The project was re-started in late January, 2009.

A part of this project end, we also made some website updates. On the Research Pages and in the forums, the project is moved from Active Research to Completed Research.

Completing this project is a significant contribution to the research of Dengue Fever, Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever and other diseases caused by the Flaviviridea family of viruses. This same research would have taken 205 years to complete on the computers that the researchers from UTMB had available to them in 2007.

Phase 1 was designed to serve as a comprehensive screening of approximately 3 million small "drug-like" molecules and identify several thousand molecules which attach to these virus enzymes in a manner that disables them. Molecules such as these may lead to drugs which can keep the disease from spreading in the body. The purpose of Phase 1 was to reduce the number of molecules being examined to only those that are the most promising candidates. These molecules will be further examined in Phase 2.

Genome Comparison Project:

In the first phase of the project on the World Community Grid, more than 2.8 million protein sequences from 3,774 organisms, including viruses and more than 400 organisms which the complete genome sequence had been deciphered, were ALL against ALL compared. Most of those protein sequences had been predicted after computer analysis of the genetic code, determined by many research groups since the sixties and deposited in public databases, together with their mostly putative functional annotation.

For the Genome Comparison analysis, sequences were grouped in blocks of 2,000 each, and more that 1 million block-to-block comparisons were done. Starting on December 20th, 2006, 4 million block comparisons were carried out (including redundancy and verification), and this phase was completed by March 31st, 2007.

For the second phase of the project, the initial dataset was updated with newly published predicted protein sequences mostly from genomic data, adding 393,999 new sequences. Additionally, a fully curated reference dataset was added (SwissProt – with 254,609 protein sequences), contributing to controlled annotation and data cross-referencing. This part of the Genome Comparison finished on May 14th, 2007.

Finally, an experimental dataset of about 3 million potential protein sequences derived from Open Reading Frames (ORFs) lacking a classical computational coding prediction are now being analyzed. This is an attempt to discover additional non-classical coding patterns in genome sequences. This final phase of the project is expected to take an additional 4 months of World Community Grid processing.