You can help cure diseases
Rosetta@home is a scientific research project that uses internet-connected computers to predict and design protein structures, and protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions.Their goal is to develop methods that accurately predict and design protein structures and complexes, an endeavor that may ultimately help researchers develop cures for human diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Cancer, Malaria, and Alzheimer’s.
The Rosetta@home project uses a software package called Rosetta, which was initially developed for predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. Over the years, Rosetta has evolved to also include protein design and the prediction of protein complexes. At the core of Rosetta are the physical model of macromolecular interactions and algorithms for finding the lowest energy structure for an amino acid sequence (protein structure prediction) or a protein-protein complex (protein docking) and for finding the lowest energy amino acid sequence for a protein structure or protein-protein complex (protein design). They hope to continually improve the physical model and the search algorithms based on feedback from prediction and design tests carried out by the Rosetta@home project.
In order to do this, they need your help. They believe that they are getting closer to accurately predicting and designing protein structures and protein complexes, one of the holy grails of computational biology. But in order to prove this, it requires an enormous amount of computing resources, an amount greater than the world’s largest super computers. This is only achievable through a collective effort from volunteers like you. By simply running the Rosetta@home program on you computer when it is idle and not in use, you will help speed up and extend their research in ways they couldn’t possibly attempt without your help. You will also be helping their efforts at designing new proteins to fight major diseases.
