when you think of a super computer you probably picture a bunch of server racks
covered in blinking lights and a lab somewhere but did you know that you can
easily make your home pc part of a supercomputer for free and for a good
cause the subject of today's video is a project called folding at home and no
we're not talking about laundry folding at home started at stanford
university but is now run from multiple sites around the world and the goal is
to research protein folding but how does it do this with home computers and what
the heck is protein folding anyway well stay with me here because protein isn't
just the stuff that weight lifters drink by the bucket full your body uses all
sorts of different proteins for everything from building muscle fibers
to inter cellular signaling and the crucial thing to remember about proteins
is that their function depends heavily on their shape which is where the term
folding comes in after a protein is assembled it has to
fold into its proper shape to be useful kind of like how you can't throw a piece
of paper across the room until it's in the correct shape i choose ball but
unlike a paper airplane which you can just follow simple instructions for
protein folding is much more complicated you see proteins
are made up of 20 different kinds of smaller units called amino acids and
while they're structurally similar all 20 of them have different side chains
that as the name implies stick off to the side of the molecule when you
connect a bunch of amino acids together linearly to form a protein these side
chains interact with each other in ways that cause the protein to fold depending
on how they're shaped and their electrical properties as well as you can
imagine the more amino acids the more complicated these interactions become
and a typical protein might be hundreds of amino acid residues long and of
course it's critical for a protein to end up in the correct shape or
conformation because otherwise it couldn't function for example cells have
proteins on their surfaces that serve as signaling receptors and they only
function because they're shaped in a certain way that allows them to bind
with the signaling molecules or other proteins from outside the cell kind of
like two puzzle pieces coming together the tldr is that understanding how
proteins fold has very important implications in medicine for example
understanding how viral proteins interact with cell membranes to invade
cells is critical to finding treatments to some viral diseases so the team
behind the project is currently using folding at home to research the novel
coronavirus that causes covid19 the better we can understand what parts of
the virus especially the ones that bind to human cells could be attacked with
drugs the more likely it is that we can develop medicines that can treat or cure
the disease but anyways this is Techquickie not biology quickies so let's
tie this all back to the folding at home project it turns out that simulating
protein folding patterns is very difficult computationally in nature
proteins fold in a tiny fraction of a second but it can take years of computer
time to sort out exactly how a protein will fold given a certain amino acid
sequence and a big part of the problem is that we don't yet fully understand
the mechanisms behind protein folding so the idea behind folding at home is to
leverage spare home computing power in order to solve these difficult problems
all you need to do to participate like i am is install a client onto your home pc
from the folding at home website the program will then give your system part
of a folding simulation to run and then send back to the program servers you can
specify how much of your pc spare computing muscle to use depending on how
much you want to affect your power bill and you can also choose whether to run
the simulations only when the system is idle or also when you're actively using
them or maybe you choose depending on how hot
your house is already if you have a high-end graphics card
you're going to help even more the highly parallel nature of GPU
architectures which you can learn more about up here can really speed up
simulations but you also don't need super fancy hardware the current version
of the client supports cpus all the way back to pentium 4. now it might seem
like the impact one system makes on the project is
minuscule but all that spare computing power really adds up and taken
collectively the folding at home network is up there with the world's top super
computers this has enabled real scientific breakthroughs that would have
been much harder to reach otherwise hundreds of scientific papers have been
published from the project's findings and they've also been useful for those
involved in drug discovery so if you can spare a bit of power download the
folding at home app today join the LTT folding team and make a difference your
pc might even wind up finding a cure for the coronavirus which could not only
save lives but also finally put an end to all these people hoarding toilet
paper what's up with that anyway geez it doesn't make you poo more you poo the
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