Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : What is the difference between all these protein related projects?
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Hoelder1in Send message Joined: 30 Sep 05 Posts: 169 Credit: 3,915,947 RAC: 0 |
Since there has been a lengthy discussion in this thread, on whether "Folding@home's approach has become somewhat obsolete", here is my subjective, non-expert view on this: At the time Folding@home started (I participated from shortly after the project was announced, I think in 98 or 99) there was a lot of talk about the Human Genome Project and how we would be able to read the letters of the genome but not understand their meaning. Computing the 3D structures of the proteins from their sequence that could be read off the genes seemed to be the most straight forward approach to tackle that problem, even from my laypersons point of view - and Folding@home seemed to be the only game in town where my humble computer (300 MHz PII at the time ;-) would be able to actually participate in and it felt great ! There were some nagging doubts, however, whether Folding@home's molecular dynamics approach would be really the most promising method to solve the "protein folding problem" (determining the 3D structure of proteins to atomic resolution by computational means) but I figured that as long as no one else seemed to be able to solve the problem by other, more efficient computational methods, Folding@home's work would perhaps at least lay the ground work for being able to solve the problem sometime down the line. Another thing that cast some doubt on Folding@home's work was when I learned that there was such a thing as CASP in which Folding@home didn't even participate. So yes, if one thinks that Folding@home's eventual goal is to solve the "protein folding problem" as defined above, its approach seems somewhat peripheral (though perhaps useful for some questions, like mis-folding), and given the fact that there are now, since very recently, other approaches that, at least for a fraction of the smaller proteins, actually do solve the problem (as described in the Rosetta Science paper from October), perhaps also somewhat obsolete. Well, just my personal take on this - and by the way: I am not the person who wrote that statement in Wikipedia. ;-) Here are the only two statements by David Baker I found where he commented on Folding@home in the forum and I doubt he will ever say anything more specific that could be regarded as criticism of his colleagues' work: ;-) 26 Sep 2005 The Rosetta@home project goals are very different from those of Folding@home. The goal of Folding@home, I believe, is to determine how long proteins take to fold, given the sequence of the protein and knowledge of its three dimensional structure. The goal of Rosetta@home is to predict the three dimensional structure from the amino acid sequence. As explained in the Daily Telegraph article and the press releases, Rosetta has been the best method for structure prediction for quite some time...[i] 10 Dec 2005 [i]...Rosetta@home is very different from folding@home. rosetta@home aims to predict naturally ocurring protein structures and design new and useful ones; folding@home is simulating the process of protein folding. Team betterhumans.com - discuss and celebrate the future - hoelder1in.org |
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What is the difference between all these protein related projects?
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