Rosetta@home in the New York Times

Recently there have been several interesting news bulletins about Rosetta@home and today I would like to feature an article published in the New York Times on 26/Dec/2017.

Most articles about Rosetta@home are published in science journals making them technical and difficult to comprehend for people unfamiliar with the subject. When I read the article in the New York Times, I thought this is finally a good read for everybody interested to learn more about Rosetta@home.

Rosetta@home performs research to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins. This could ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases like HIV, Malaria, Cancer and Alzheimer. It has more than 31,000 active members and is using the BOINC platform to exchange work-units and results with Internet connected computers. Rosetta@home is also a whitelisted Gridcoin project. The Gridcoin network rewards BOINC users in paying them for their computing efforts, which helps to offset costs like electricity bills. Team Gridcoin has 738 active members on this project and generates 12% of the total (RAC) output (source: 1, 2, 3 & 4).

The article starts with an introduction to proteins and the studies performed to understand their shapes and how they fold. Based on this research, Dr. David Baker and his team launched in 1998 a platform called Rosetta. Scientists use this to build virtual chains of amino acids and then compute the most likely form they will fold into. The platform lead to the development of Rosetta@home, which is actively being used by more than 31,000 volunteers around the globe.

Dr. David Baker (director of the Institute for Protein Design) in his lab at the University of Washington, where scientists are learning how to create cellular proteins to perform a variety of tasks (Credit: Evan McGlinn - The New York Times).

Over the years the application has become vastly more accurate in predicting how proteins fold and now they use Rosetta in creating proteins that don’t even exist in nature. These laboratory synthesized proteins are for example tested to fight the flu or help people who can’t tolerate gluten by cutting apart gluten molecules in food.

At the moment, Dr. Baker and his colleagues can only make short-chained proteins but the technology and computational power is increasing quickly where the team is now testing longer, bigger proteins that might do more complex jobs. As the team will understand more and more about the basic folding principles, they will be able to exploit it in designing drugs to fight diseases like cancer.

You can read the full article here.

Resources:
(1) Gridcoin
(2) Rosetta@home
(3) BOINCStats
(4) Wikipedia

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