Street Tech: Now With Folded Proteins!

Street Tech has joined the Stanford Folding@Home project. This is a distributed computing project (a la Seti@Home) where your unused computer processing cycles are put to work helping to simulate protein folding.

As proteins are assembled (or “folded”), misfolding can lead to all sorts of diseases. By running computer models which simulate gazillions of folds, researchers can study, and hopefully come to a better understanding of, how proteins fold (and misfold). This could lead to prevention and treatment of fold-related diseases (such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow ALS, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s).

So, to help out in the effort, we’ve created Team StreetTech. To join, all you have to do is download one of the Folding@Home programs (for Mac, Win, Linux) and enter the Team StreetTech number in the set-up (Team #47060). You can run F@H as a screensaver (Mac) or as a stand-alone client or text console.

C’mon, Street Techies: Show your TechTeam spirit and do something useful with all those wasted CPU cycles you spent so much money on.

[This picture shows the first Team StreetTech folding sim. Here I’m helping out on protein number p1155_L939_K12. Is it just me, or does that sickly greenish molecule look like trouble?]