WEBVTT

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when you think of a super computer you probably picture a bunch of server racks

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covered in blinking lights and a lab somewhere but did you know that you can

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easily make your home pc part of a supercomputer for free and for a good

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cause the subject of today's video is a project called folding at home and no

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we're not talking about laundry folding at home started at stanford

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university but is now run from multiple sites around the world and the goal is

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to research protein folding but how does it do this with home computers and what

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the heck is protein folding anyway well stay with me here because protein isn't

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just the stuff that weight lifters drink by the bucket full your body uses all

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sorts of different proteins for everything from building muscle fibers

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to inter cellular signaling and the crucial thing to remember about proteins

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is that their function depends heavily on their shape which is where the term

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folding comes in after a protein is assembled it has to

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fold into its proper shape to be useful kind of like how you can't throw a piece

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of paper across the room until it's in the correct shape i choose ball but

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unlike a paper airplane which you can just follow simple instructions for

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protein folding is much more complicated you see proteins

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are made up of 20 different kinds of smaller units called amino acids and

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while they're structurally similar all 20 of them have different side chains

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that as the name implies stick off to the side of the molecule when you

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connect a bunch of amino acids together linearly to form a protein these side

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chains interact with each other in ways that cause the protein to fold depending

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on how they're shaped and their electrical properties as well as you can

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imagine the more amino acids the more complicated these interactions become

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and a typical protein might be hundreds of amino acid residues long and of

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course it's critical for a protein to end up in the correct shape or

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conformation because otherwise it couldn't function for example cells have

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proteins on their surfaces that serve as signaling receptors and they only

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function because they're shaped in a certain way that allows them to bind

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with the signaling molecules or other proteins from outside the cell kind of

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like two puzzle pieces coming together the tldr is that understanding how

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proteins fold has very important implications in medicine for example

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understanding how viral proteins interact with cell membranes to invade

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cells is critical to finding treatments to some viral diseases so the team

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behind the project is currently using folding at home to research the novel

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coronavirus that causes covid19 the better we can understand what parts of

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the virus especially the ones that bind to human cells could be attacked with

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drugs the more likely it is that we can develop medicines that can treat or cure

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the disease but anyways this is Techquickie not biology quickies so let's

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tie this all back to the folding at home project it turns out that simulating

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protein folding patterns is very difficult computationally in nature

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proteins fold in a tiny fraction of a second but it can take years of computer

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time to sort out exactly how a protein will fold given a certain amino acid

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sequence and a big part of the problem is that we don't yet fully understand

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the mechanisms behind protein folding so the idea behind folding at home is to

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leverage spare home computing power in order to solve these difficult problems

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all you need to do to participate like i am is install a client onto your home pc

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from the folding at home website the program will then give your system part

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of a folding simulation to run and then send back to the program servers you can

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specify how much of your pc spare computing muscle to use depending on how

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much you want to affect your power bill and you can also choose whether to run

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the simulations only when the system is idle or also when you're actively using

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them or maybe you choose depending on how hot

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your house is already if you have a high-end graphics card

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you're going to help even more the highly parallel nature of GPU

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architectures which you can learn more about up here can really speed up

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simulations but you also don't need super fancy hardware the current version

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of the client supports cpus all the way back to pentium 4. now it might seem

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like the impact one system makes on the project is

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minuscule but all that spare computing power really adds up and taken

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collectively the folding at home network is up there with the world's top super

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computers this has enabled real scientific breakthroughs that would have

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been much harder to reach otherwise hundreds of scientific papers have been

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published from the project's findings and they've also been useful for those

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involved in drug discovery so if you can spare a bit of power download the

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folding at home app today join the LTT folding team and make a difference your

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pc might even wind up finding a cure for the coronavirus which could not only

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save lives but also finally put an end to all these people hoarding toilet

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paper what's up with that anyway geez it doesn't make you poo more you poo the

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same amount anyway this video is brought to you by

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at freshbooks.com forward slash tech wiki so thanks for watching guys if you

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liked this video give it a thumbs up get subscribed and hit us up in the comments section with your suggestions

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for topics that we should cover in the future