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Digital Parasite
08-28-2007, 02:44 PM
Check out David Baker's log for the latest news:
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=1177

The new Rosetta@Home Game:


I've been working with several others in the lab on an "interactive Rosetta" project. The vision is that one day, you'll be able to interact with Rosetta as it runs, both (1) to help it produce better results and (2) to learn about what it's doing.

We're not there yet, but we have an early prototype for #2, the educational side. This is a simple "game" you can play in your web browser (using Java) to find the missing side chain for a designed protein that might be used to fight cancer. In this case, there's a small number of choices and the right answer should be obvious. However, it illustrates one of the basic steps that Rosetta performs thousands of times every time it designs a protein.

More "levels" for the game will be coming in the future. Also we're already planning to change the interface on the Java applet and to add a "score board" so you can compete against others, but if you try it out and have other comments or ideas to share, please post them here.

Here's the link: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/rah_misc/king_rotamer_game/

Some exciting new results:


The results of the last few days of computations of Rosetta@home on your computers have been pretty amazing! In collaboration with a group at the NIH, we experimented with adding a very small amount of information about protein structures from nuclear magnetic resonance experiments to the rosetta structure prediction process. this information is fairly easily obtainable, and doesn't seem like it would have much effect, but the results show quite contrary--the models produced are extremely accurate! this has the potential to revolutionize how scientists determine protein 3D structures using NMR data. We would never have been able to test the idea, which came up in a phone conversation several months ago, without all of your contributions.

Today I spoke at the AidsVaccine07 meeting about our work on designing vaccines. Scientists who have been working on this very challenging problem for many years are I think excited about our approach as it is something that hasn't been tried before and makes sense conceptually. While we are still far from a vaccine, our initial results with collaborators at the NIH are promising. I spoke to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal after my talk, and I think she is interested in writing an article on rosetta@home and HIV vaccine design.

Rosetta@Home work is being published in the prestigious Nature journal:


Congratulations! Your collective results on structure prediction, protein structure refinement, and solving the X-ray crystallographic phase problem with rosetta@home were just yesterday accepted for publication as a research article in the journal Nature which many of you can find at your local newstands (I'll post here when the issue appears in print). As those of you familar with scientific publishing are certainly aware, Nature is probably the most widely read journal in the natural sciences, and only one or two research articles are published in any issue (almost all are shorter letters), so your work will reach a very broad audience and have exceptionally wide impact.

Bok
08-28-2007, 03:14 PM
Cool.

Interesting articles. Look forward to the Nature article as I pick that up every now and then..

Bok :cheers:

Digital Parasite
09-10-2007, 02:45 PM
As some of you might have noticed, Rosetta had a catastrophic failure of their NAS so the project was down for a few days:

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=1177&nowrap=true#45773


As almost all of you know, we had the largest computer failure in the history of Rosetta@Home last Tuesday. Not only were we unable to make use of your valuable contributions, but also all of our internal computers were down as well, so the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in my research group have had their resaearch projects stalled out. Quite a disaster! Fortunately, Keith and Chance, the computer gurus who keep Rosetta@Home and the group cmputer clusters running, are absolute pros, and they have worked miracles to get the project back on line even with this catastrophic failure. (to give you an idea, whenever anybody at the UW wants to set up a computer cluster or has any question to do with large scale computing hardware, Keith and Chance are the people they go to to find the answer). From Keith's most recent email, it appears that things are not fully back to normal, but hopefully we will be running as strong as ever very soon. In fact, as I will post once we are back up to speed, we have a very pressing scientific challenge we will need all of your help on!

Also some new published work with users credited in the paper:

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=1177&nowrap=true#45776


Now for the good news!

As many of you will remember, you started seeing RNA molecules folding on your screensavers in addition to proteins about 9 months ago. Rhiju had generalized the Rosetta folding methodology beyond proteins to RNA which also adopts folded functional structures in addition to being a critical component in the reading of the genetic code inscribed in DNA. Using your computers, he tested his new RNA folding protocol, and the exciting results he obtained he reported in a paper that was submitted to the proceedings of the national academy of sciences (PNAS) several months ago. The paper was accepted with rave reviews, and has just appeared in print.

It is the policy of the PNAS journal to highlight for each issue the papers of exceptional interest. Your work, as reported in Rhiju's paper, is the major highlight of the issue of PNAS that just appeared! You can read about this months highlights in PNAS at

http://www.pnas.org/misc/highlights.shtml

In this paper, as in all of our papers (quite a few by now!) that have relied absolutely on your contributions, we have thanked all rosetta@home participants and cited by name those contributors who found the lowest energy structures. You can see the list at

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/data/0703836104/DC1/7

Thank you for your contributions, and we look forward to many more important scientific advances with your help at rosetta@home in the next year!