I've graduated with honors from High School.... attended a few years of College.... yet however I feel totally inept when I'm reviewing the posts and wondering which one I should join.....and really really thinking although I was a Theatre major I could have done better by myself and continue to have a thinking mind. Please allow my ineptness to continue to assist you fabulous site and please if possible maybe someone could 'dumb down' the posts so the real world could join in, perhaps! ~Erika

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Welcome to Rosetta!

Disclaimer: I am fairly inept when it comes to science, but I'm sure someone will correct me quickly if I make a mistake in explaining this.

The goal of Rosetta@home is to predict the shape of Proteins with computers.

When we hear Proteins most of us probably think of food, but Proteins are essential to the structure of all living cells and viruses.

These proteins are highly complex constructions and knowing how they "fold" can be used to ultimately manipulate them and find new ways to fight diseases and viruses. Once a scientist knows the 3 dimensional structure of a protein, he can infer what it does in cells. Just like we all immediatly know what a new car does, even though we haven't seen the particular model before.

There is a distributed computing project (SIMAP) dedicated to nothing but matching known proteins with each other to create a database where scientists can find similiar proteins.

Learning how Proteins interact in diseases also means drugs can be developed that target this specific protein. Currently, new drugs only improve on the way they target the same protein, so the improvement isn't as significant as finding new proteins that can be targeted.

To use a not-so-good analogy: You want to tear down a large house (disease) with explosives (drugs), but if you only know the location of one corner, you can only detonate explosives there. That may not be enough to get the house down. You can add more C4, but chances are you damage more of the surrounding and the house will remain standing. Once you find new corners (proteins) you can detonate charges in multiple locations simultaneously and the thing will come down for good.

The huge complexity of proteins may become more clear with an image of a protein structure (from wikipedia)



The computer power necessary to conduct research in a reasonable amount of time is growing immensily. A modern personal computer is now faster than the "supercomputers" used for advanced research 15 years ago. And there are over 50,000 computers working on this project.

Today supercomputers are, of course, also much faster - but there are many different approaches to solving a problem (and even more problems worth researching) meaning that the time something can run on a supercomputer is heavily limited so that more people can get a share of the processing power. That's why these distributed computing projects are so great. They may be slower, but they bring in results 24/7 and cost almost nothing. Electricity for one computer is nothing you notice on the electricity bill, running 50,000 processors, however, costs a fortune.


Hope I could explain this a little - if not, I'm sure someone can clear up any questions you may have. No matter to which project you end up dedicating your computer, doing ANY sort of research on it is better than leaving it idle ;)

Great analogy Soriak. And I'm no biochemist either, but what you said about supercomputers is right on too. There are many more problems people are trying to solve with them now... and, as always, supercomputers are very expensive, and Rosetta isn't loaded down with money to buy, run and maintain one.

Here is another analogy if you'd like one.

Welcome to Rosetta! We're all working together to make sense of Dr. Baker, so don't feel you are alone. Keep reading and following links and over time it will start to make more sense.

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Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/