Gridcoin, GPUgrid and the battle against Cancer.

In this edition of my thread of posts, connected with Gridcoin and the various projects, being whitelisted in this great community, I will face again the Medicine science and namely the Cancer research field of the GPUgrid project. I had a post about one month ago (or even a bit more), where I met you with the project itself.
https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@mdosev/gridcoin-and-the-gpugrid-project-volunteer-computation-for-building-protein-models

Today I will highlight the IMPORTANCE of this project for understanding Cancer and all the processes in the core of this disease.

Some proteins are naturally structured, but a lot of them are really not. And the ones that aren't are actually called intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). Their main characteristic is that they don't have structure, but DO have many important roles in the biology of cells. These proteins are not that fully understood, and need further testing. These exact proteins are found in various mutaded forms in many cancers at various spots, controlling the expression of genes and the communication in the cell. A very common chemical modification to IDPs, also known as phosphorylation, can cause one type of disordered proteins, known as KID to change it's behavior. The scientists of the project show that this could have some very important consequences for the interaction of proteins, which affects various things like what genes are expressed and how they pass signals around the cell.

How the projects aims and helps these studies?

As we know from the first post about GPUgrid, the project builds various protein models and their interactions with other chemicals, substances, proteins.
The project scientists have determined the binding free energies of cetuximab's Fab V(H)-V(L) domains and endogenous EGF ligand to wild type and S468R EGFR by so-called high-throughput molecular dynamics. There is a possible mechanism of resistance and reveals some hypothesis, that should be validated experimentally and are in demand of a massive amount of computation energy, provided by the computers and devices, which are volunteering this project.

There is a "domain", called SH2, which is actually involved in some interactions between proteins. The major role of cell-to-cell communication is players by this exact domain, as long with some signalling processes, responsible for cell growth and development. The final goal for running such simulations is not exactly to expand further knowledge on this particular system, but to use it as a model for developing brand new methods to calculate protein relations and interplay. This for sure will be very useful in fields as in the study dealing with certain wrong forms of proteins and why exactly do they stop interacting with other close proteins (protein partners). Such phenomena can be observed in diseases such as Cancer and the answer for curing and fighting them is in the hands of scientists.

Don't be afraid to join such initiatives and please, think about the benefits, that all the world will have, if there is further knowledge about these projects. Of course, helping Gridcoin whitelisted projects will reward you with some coins, as a gift for the support. Don't just waste your idle computer energy. Helping these causes is a lot better, than Mining other coins with the spent energy, going for literally nothing.

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Sources:
https://www.gpugrid.net/science.php - Source of images, The main website of the project.
https://www.gridcoin.us/ and https://gridcoin.science/ - official Gridcoin websites.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ - BOINC client instructions and download.