A key new work from the Pande Group just came out in Nature Chemistry and got a nice holiday present: our work on the cover!
Briefly, we applied methods developed and honed on Folding@home to Google Exacycle (Google’s massively parallel cloud resource — a lot like running Folding@home behind their firewall). The resources that Google donated to PG/Folding@home was pretty massive, allowing us to tackle a really significant and challenging problem in biology and drug design.
Specifically, we were able to study the protein dynamics of B2AR, a G-Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) important in many medical and biological processes (especially asthma and heart disease). What’s even more exciting to us is that this opens the door for FAH and our methods to be much more broadly applied. In fact, this is just the first of several papers in the pipeline using FAH and FAH-like methods to tackle challenging biomedical problems.
For more information, you can also check out Stanford’s news’ coverage on this.