What are proteins?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Proteins help your body break down food into energy, regulate your moods, and fight disease.
What is protein folding?
Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." While protein folding is critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, much of the process remains a mystery.
Why is it important to understand how proteins fold?
When proteins do not fold correctly, also known as misfolding, there can be serious health consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many cancers.
If we better understand protein misfolding we can design drugs and therapies to combat these illnesses.
How can I help?
The best way to help is by downloading and running the free Folding@home client software. Each computer that participates increases our ability to understand how proteins fold.
Once installed the Folding@home software runs behind the scenes using otherwise unused computing time. Mostly likely you will hardly even notice it.
