Happy new year 2025!
Thanks to everyone who participated in Folding@home this past year, and happy new year to you and yours! With your help, we’ve made a lot of progress towards understanding biology…
Read moreCategory: Science
An allosteric glue
There has been growing interest in developing drugs that bind two or more proteins to “glue” them together. Tacrolimus (aka FK506) is a famous example.  Tacrolimus is an immune-suppressant that…
Read morePredicting drugs’ lipophilicity with Folding@home
Computational chemistry and machine learning continue to play an increasing role in drug discovery. One advance has been the increased accuracy with which we can predict the affinity of…
Read moreImproving protein design on Folding@home
The protein design field has been making great strides with the advent of new machine learning tools trained on large databases of protein structures and sequences. While designs coming from…
Read moreTackling Condensates
In recent years, scientists have identified a new type of compartment in cells, often called a condensate. These condensates form when weakly interacting proteins and RNA molecules segregate themselves from…
Read moreConnecting with single molecule experiments
Our new work shows how to predict the results of single molecule experiments from large simulations, like those performed on Folding@home. Showing that simulations are consistent with experiments is important…
Read moreTowards physics-based precision medicine
The goal of precision medicine is to utilize our knowledge of the molecular causes of disease to better diagnose and treat patients. In the precision medicine framework, diseases are subdivided…
Read moreHow does ApoE cause Alzheimer’s disease?
A number of active projects on Folding@home right now aim to understand how different forms of the protein apolipoprotein E (ApoE) determine one’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease…
Read moreAlphaFold opens new opportunities for Folding@home
Folding@home has long sought to understand how proteins self-assemble, or fold, into their functional structures and what the functional implications of dynamics within the context of a folded protein are.…
Read moreUnraveling the Mystery of Drug Specificity: The Case of Blebbistatin
When it comes to designing novel drugs, achieving specificity is a major challenge. An effective drug must bind tightly to its target protein while avoiding unwanted side effects that can…
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