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View Full Version : Folding@Home Attacks New Disease



Dyyryath
11-21-2003, 01:53 AM
The <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding">Folding@Home project</a> is looking for clues in the fight against a new disease. Here's what they have to say:<br><br><table width="90%" border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="1" bordercolor="#63635A" bgcolor="#E7E7E2" align="center"><tr><td style="font-size: 12px; font-style: italic;"><b>11/9/2003 New disease under study</b><br><br>In collaboration with other groups at Stanford (esp Klein's group), we have started looking at Collagen folding and misfolding. Collagen is the most common protein in the body and mutations in collagen leads to a very nasty disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta (or OI for short). In many cases, OI is lethal and leads to miscarriage. However, 1 in 10,000 people have some sort of mutational in collagen. For many, where the mutation is not very serious, it lies unknown and misdiagnosed and leads to brittle bones and other more suble problems. In others, however, mutations lead to more serious morphological disorders (see below).<br><br>We are starting to model collagen folding and misfolding in the 1000 series projects. For more info, see <a href="http://folding.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/allprojects#1001">http://folding.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/allprojects#1001</a>.</td</tr></table><br><br>There are some images of what this disease does <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/news.html">right here</a>. It certainly sounds like a worthy endeavor for distributed computing to be contributing to.