When you think of a supercomputer, you probably picture a bunch of server racks covered in
blinking lights in 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 has 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, cause protein isn't just the stuff that weight lifters drink by
the bucketful. Your body uses all sorts of different proteins for everything from building muscle fibers
to intercellular 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.
Unlike 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 they're 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 COVID-19.
The better we can understand what parts of the virus, especially the ones that bind to
human cells, could be attacked for the 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 Quickie, 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's spare computing muscle to use depending on how much
you want it to affect your power bill. 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 you 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 miniscule.
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 supercomputers.
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? Jesus, it doesn't make you poo more. You poo the same amount.
Anyway. So thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, get subscribed, and hit us up in the comments
section with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.