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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Completed Research
Forum: Human Proteome Folding
Thread: Folding@Home |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 8
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I spent a number of hours crunching for a similar cause called Folding@Home. I also recently found a similar program called Predictor@Home. I am now using the WCG agent instead of F@H because I find it more managable.
Anyway, my question is, both of these other two "@Home" programs seem to have similar goals in mind as the Human Proteome Folding project here. I was worried that any of these 3 individual projects was working toward the exact same goal... and thus would be resulting in wasted CPU time doing the same thing more than once. Can anyone with a real understanding of these kind of projects either confirm or discredit my worries? If they are, infact, different causes, why not approach them and work towards uniting them all under the WCG project? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
From my meager understanding, I can tell you that the WCG and the other grid computing networks won't be joining into one roof... probably from the fact that wcg is sponsored by IBM, and the other grids are sponsored by something else. Correct me if i'm wrong...
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The various projects have different methodologies, different targets and different goals.
I can't see the likes of Standord, the University of Washington, Oxford etc all collaborating as one in a unified project. |
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Michael Milan
Cruncher England Joined: Nov 20, 2005 Post Count: 14 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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As far as I know, predictor@home and folding@home are projects that design and improve the methods and techniques which are then used by projects such as the Human Proteome Folding project. You can think of them being part of a much larger, multi-stage plan to cure disease.
For example: Stage 1: Design and perfect techniques to accurately predict protein structures (predictor@home, folding@home). Stage 2: Apply these techniques to discover the shapes of a large number of human proteins (Human Proteome Folding project). Stage 3: Use the results from stage 2 to help scientists design new drugs. The HPF project actually uses a program called Rosetta to carry out its work. If I'm not mistaken, there's another @home project called rosetta@home which is the very program being used in HPF, but their work is to do with stage 1, which is to continually improve and refine the Rosetta program to be more accurate and reliable. Rosetta, Predictor and Folding all use different methods to try and predict protein structures, but they're all going through a continual process of development and improvement, so it's still too early to say which method will eventually prove to be the most effective. So until then, it shouldn't be considered a waste of time for all such projects to exist at the same time. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
To add to the above post, I have tried to categorize the projects according to their work.
protein structure and function prediction projects: 1) Rosetta@Home 2) Predictor@Home 3) World Community Grid These projects are concerned with determining what is the final shape of a folded protein, and what is the function of each protein. To my knowledge World Community Grid aims to generate a data base of proteins that have direct relation to disease in order to be used by biologists. protein folding pathway prediction projects: Folding@Home Folding@Home is concerned with determing how do proteins actually fold. So by knowing the actual structure of a protein they want to know how does a protein go from an unfolded state to the final folded state. F@H is mainly concerned with diseases that result from the misfolding of proteins. They focus more on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. In addition to that, they also study some forms of cancer. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Yes, Dr. David Baker at the University of Washington is running Rosetta@ home ( http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ ) to improve Rosetta, a program which folds, docks and even designs proteins. Here is a post he made on 23 Nov 2005 15:40:13 UTC in this thread: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=460
You have all made very good points! Yes--a difference between this project and other distributed computing projects is that you are actively participating in methods development efforts rather than large scale production level runs. Why are we doing methods development? It is because computational modeling of biological systems is still in its infancy, and if we can make the methods better, we will be able to produce much more accurate and useful models. While Rosetta is probably the best biological structure modeling program in existence today, we feel that it is important to work to make it still better. While you so far have seen the methods development aspect primarily, the program is being used for concrete applications already, for example we just helped build a model of an infectious component of anthrax toxin. As I said below, we are actively engaged in trying to design a vaccine for HIV. In the near future we will start distributing vaccine design calculations along with the structure prediction methods development calculations, so you will be doing a mix of basic research with long term payoff, and vaccine design with potentially huge short term payoff. |
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Wotan
Cruncher Joined: Nov 19, 2005 Post Count: 36 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I think that the 3 (4..)project are doing 3 different thing:
1)Rosetta@home is improving the program 2)predictor@home and HPF here at WCG is trying to predict the protein structure 3)folding@home is trying to predict the folding of the protein... |
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Viktors
Former World Community Grid Tech Joined: Sep 20, 2004 Post Count: 653 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Just to confirm:
Rosetta@home: This project is working on improving the Rosetta program, which we currently use for HPF at WorldCommunityGrid. Folding@home: Is studying the protein folding process in detail. Predictor@home: Is trying to develop new (and better) algorithms for protein folding prediction (what Rosetta currently does fairly well, but there is always room for improvement). Human Proteome Folding (here): Is using Rosetta to predict, for the first time, the structures of a vary large number of yet-to-be-studied human proteins and others important to know about for humans. |
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