using Folding@Home rn, but I don’t quite understand how that works.
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Okay so basically, your DNA encodes all the information for keeping you alive. It does this by storing the information necessary to make proteins. Proteins are little molecular machines do do everything that’s required to be alive, the most well known proteins are probably enzymes. Proteins are made as a long chain of amino acids, 21 in total, and the order they are put together is encoded in the DNA. Once the long chain of amino acids is formed, it needs to be arranged so that it takes the proper 3-D form, because it is the three dimensional arrangement in space that allows proteins to do their job. We call this process of taking the chain and making a specific shape “folding”.
Okay, so why is it important? As already explained, it is the protein’S 3-D shape that dictates how it works, often time the active amino acids on a protein are tend or hundreds of links (called residues) apart, but once they are folded they can be right next to each other. The problem is, the DNA sequence only tells us the order, not the 3-D arrangement. So we need to solve the “protein folding problem” to better predict what a protein will look like from only the associated DNA sequence (and that’s what you’re doing when you’re playing Fold It! or other similar games)!
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