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Folding@home GPU2 Beta Released, Examined
ThinSkin writes "Stanford has recently released an update to their Folding@home GPU-accelerated client, which includes notable upgrades such as support for more current Radeon graphics cards and even a visualizer to see what's going on. ExtremeTech takes a good look at the new Folding@home GPU2 client and interviews Director Dr. Vijay Pande about the project. To the uninitiated, Folding@home is a distributed computing project in which hundreds of thousands of PCs and PS3s devote a portion of their computing power to crunch chunks of biological data. The goal is 'to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.'"
Actually this is a grossly incomplete statement. Due to the fact that the process of Non-homologous End Joining (NHEJ) repair of DNA double strand breaks involves the exonuclease (DNA end-eating) proteins WRN and DCLRE1C (Artemis), the repair of double strand breaks corrupts the genome via microdeletions. Microdeletions can result in frameshift mutations which can of course result in protein mis-folding. The accumulation of these frameshift mutations and misfolded proteins over the lifespan of cells has downstream consequences including less efficient or improper cell function (cancer or aging) as well as the induction of apoptosis (managed cell death) -- more aging.
Thus the fundamental processes which will terminate most of our lives are related to mis-folded proteins. It is not limited to the less common "mad cow disease" (which few humans need to worry about) or even Alzheimer's (which more humans should be worried about as research funding is failing to keep pace with either inflation or the growth rate in people afflicted with the disease) [1].
(If any of these concepts are unfamiliar, the wikipedia discussions of the topics are not too bad.)
1. One could get into a long discussion as to whether or not to consider Alzheimer's a protein folding disease. I happen to be of the opinion that any disease involving the accumulation of molecules that are not present in "normal" cells is leaning in that direction.