Kathleen Berry, Megan Connon, Hailey Sheppard
Why Rosetta at Home?
The Rosetta project works to predict and design protein sturcture and protein complexes, that may eventually help in curing HIV/AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, malaria and many other diseases.
How it works?
This project is the next step beyond the Human Genome project and works to predict the shapes proteins fold into in nature, that can ultimately help in creating new enzymes, drugs, and vaccines to treat a variety of diseases. The folds of a protein are determined by the order of amino acids. To find the natural fold of a protein, the lowest energy fold must be identified. Rosetta uses the following strategy to find the low energy folds…
It starts with an unfolded chain
The chain moves apart into a new shape
The energy of the new shape is calculated
Depending on the energy change, the move is accepted or rejected
1-4 are repeated over and over again
The chain moves apart into a new shape
The energy of the new shape is calculated
Depending on the energy change, the move is accepted or rejected
1-4 are repeated over and over again
Rosetta logs the lowest energy shape in the final predicted structure (the trajectory). The trajectory has two stages. One: A simplified representation of amino acids is used to quickly try many different shapes. Two: A full representation is used and smaller changes are made in an attempt to discover the correct arrangement. This is known as “relaxation.”
Five to twenty trajectories are generated per work unit on a single computer and the lowest energy shape is recorded for each one. There are over 39,500 computer users contributing to the project.
LINKS/SOURCES
1 comment:
Ladies, your blog is exceptional! It is great that you included a summary of the processes employed by your grid. I will be discussing blogs in class - would you mind if I show yours?
Outstanding job!
Dr. Walker
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