using Folding@Home rn, but I don’t quite understand how that works.
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Imagine a protein as a very long chain covered with hundreds of magnets of different sizes. All those magnets are pushing and pulling on each other, so rather than staying one long chain, the chain quickly clumps up. The shape of that clump is hugely important to the protein’s function, much like how a key has to be just the right shape to open a door. The weird thing is, because all those magnets interact, if you add or subtract or swap even one magnet, the shape of the whole protein can change dramatically.
In reality, they’re not just push vs pull magnets, but different amino acids that all interact differently with each other. As a result, having the list of amino acids in order that make up a protein (AKA a gene) doesn’t tell you what the protein will look like, because figuring out how huge numbers of amino acids will all interact with each other is very complicated, and it’s taken us a long time with the most advanced forms of computing to be able to do it.
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