Talk:Protein Science I

Paticipants of this class may be interested in a protein folding screensaver. Shows good graphics of molecules being processed and overview information from the data set. If you install on your system please consider joining the Wikiversity processing team. [1] See step one of http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity_Distributed_Virtual_Supercomputer learning project. Thanks for your time and consideration in this matter. Mirwin 02:27, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly support the efforts of Rosetta@Home, having been a post-doc in David Baker's lab and having fond memories of my friends there. However, it should be noted that Rosetta is used to predict protein structure, not to shed light on the protein folding process per se. In other words, Rosetta predicts the endpoint of folding (the protein native structure), without necessarily predicting the pathway(s) taken to reach that endpoint.

Users may also be interested in Vijay Pande's Folding@Home, which uses molecular dynamics (MD) to predict protein folding pathways. There, the problem may be that the energy functions used are not yet accurate enough. The energy functions used in MD are approximate; since protein folding involves a delicate cancellation of a great number of interatomic interactions, molecular simulations may greatly amplify the inaccuracies of an imperfect energy function. Proteins 21:37, 21 December 2007 (UTC)