So Rosetta@home is used to find the lowest energy state of a protein, right? Then what's the purpose of POEM@home, GPUGRID, WCG's protease folding project, Folding@home, etc.? Aren't they all doing the same thing? You'd think it would make the most sense to have all of the protein folding done under one project. It seems there's a bunch of redundant docking simulations too.

I'm hearing you. Each project focuses on a different type of Protein science.

What Poem dose

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Have a crunching good day!!

If mankind knew exactly how proteins fold, then it would be redundant to have H1N1, HIV and etc. folded more then once. But the science is not that perfect yet. And so you have multiple teams out there trying new things to study how the folding occurs and how to accurately model it in a computer.

If you relate it to mice in a maze, where the correct path through the maze is unknown, is it redundant to have multiple mice in the maze at the same time? And yet, isn't that the approach that will bring the lowest time for ONE mouse to reach the exit?

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Then what's the purpose of POEM@home, GPUGRID, WCG's protease folding project, Folding@home, etc.? Aren't they all doing the same thing?

WCG's protease folding project is Rosetta. Rosetta@Home helps the Bakerlab team improve the Rosetta protein folding software, which is then used by projects like WCG to focus on specific problems. If a thread on another forum I read can be believed, the head of WCG's protease folding research used to work in the Bakerlab at one point and continues to share his knowledge to help improve the Rosetta software. So WCG & Rosetta are working hand in hand.

Folding@home works in a different way to Rosetta. As I read on another website, Folding@home is focussed on the natural process of folding proteins to improve our understanding of how we get to the end product. Rosetta@Home is focussed on finding the folded protein and is happy to take shortcuts that bypass the natural process; e.g. rather than following the natural process of folding, Rosetta may jump several steps ahead by saying "the first section of Protein A has the same structure as the first section of Protein B, therefore we can assume the first sections of Proteins A and B will fold the same way". The two projects are not in opposition and probably learn a lot from each other's research. A better understanding of folding behaviour can help Rosetta's modelling and issues that Rosetta encounters and has to compensate for in finding a solution may also be a stumbling block in the Folding models.

Details of POEM@home's work can be found via the link given by Speedy above.

I don't know much about GPUGRID though, so I can't answer that one.

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