How does the human proteome folding project (HPF) on the world community grid (WCG) relate to Rosetta@home?

It is important to differentiate Rosetta@home from the HPF project (the one currently running on the grid), so I’ll take a few lines to explain each from the perspective of motivation. The two grids HPF and Rosetta@home are not competing grids and we would like to see them both thrive.

Rosetta@home is run by the bakerlab as a way to accelerate development of the Rosetta code. With the focus on all-atom refinement and protein design even their benchmarks (to see if they broke the code or improved the code) are taking a large amount of time. Thus, Rosetta@home is primarily for testing/developing new versions of the Rosetta code and making Rosetta better. Also the robetta server could be hooked up to this project. This grid meets the spikes in the compute demands of the robetta server and the bakerlab. Rosetta@home does not aim to produce databases that will in turn be used by biologists but it helps to make the code better, which in turn helps efforts, like HPF, that use the code to give biologists usable fold and function predictions. In that way it is an essential part of the field-wide effort to fold proteomes.

Conversely, our project, HPF on the WCG, aims to use stable versions of Rosetta to make predictions that can be presented to biologists and biomedical researchers in comprehensive databases with intuitive front ends. HPF on the WCG can be thought of as the production phase of the project, where we produce function annotation for many genomes and then distribute this product to biologists. Due to the large number of proteins we’re folding (comprehension is essential) we need a great deal of computer time if we want to make our databases comprehensive and availiable to biologists.

We are working with the bakerlab on HPF on the WCG and think of the two grids as very different parts of the solution of getting function out of fold prediction: one using Rosetta and one improving Rosetta (D Baker is involved in both projects). I spoke with David Baker this mourning and we talked about the rolls for the two grids. We also talked about differentiating the two grids at the last annual Rosetta code developers meeting (RosettaCON-2005). In any case, we largley agree that HPF is production for biologists and the biomedical community while Rosetta@home is development of new, better, code.