using Folding@Home rn, but I don’t quite understand how that works.
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Proteins are what the “blueprints” that are in our DNA are blueprints for. They are molecules that perform the vast majority of functions in our cells and consist of long strings of smaller parts known as amino acids. When proteins are created in our cells, they are created by linking these amino acids together one by one, and as this is happening, that long chain of amino acids begins folding into a specific shape that is crucial to the function of that protein.
We have sequenced the human genome, along with the genomes of hundreds of other species of life, and identified the genes in those genomes, so we know the amino acid sequences of most proteins. But because the physical shape of the protein is an important in its function, just knowing the sequences of these proteins doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about what they do and how they do it. The Folding@Home program is doing simulations to figure this out. Essentially, it starts with the protein sequence and then runs a physical simulation to try to reproduce the physics and chemistry that are occurring when that protein folds to predict what shape it will fold into. This is a very computationally intensive process, so the work is distributed across as many computers as possible.
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