To see our progress so far see:
HPF-1 Progress! 70% done!


2005-07-16

As you can see we’re progressing at a pretty constant rate now. With only 30% of the folding left and Dec-2005 right around the corner we’ve (Lars Malmstroem, Rich Bonneau, Mike Riffle :: at the UW and the ISB) been focusing on getting the results formatted for biologists. This is no small task but we’ve got a lot of the stuff in place as part of prior projects. The database back end will sit mirrored in a few places while biologists will hit the database using the tool Cytoscape. Overall a prototype of this system should be up for Yeast soon (Lars and Mike’s work). Once we see this prototype in action we’ll fire up the Human, Plasmodium, etc. versions for all the proteins we’ve done on the grid and (of course) write the paper. It’s been much less than a year on the grid and nearing 1.5 years since the IBM people convinced me that this thing was real and not some strange dream, but it seems like the project has been going on for a lot longer … so December is right around the corner. Next month I should be ready to give a link to actual database for kicks (you’ll be able to see proteins cut up into domains and navigate the annotations for each gene/protein). Thanks all you volunteers for cranking through so many proteins so far…. So far the average volunteer has folded 2.8 million protein conformations, most of which are upstairs on the disk-pack!

More later,
Richard Bonneau
ISB, Seatlle