POEM@Home
Poem@Home appears to be another protein folding project important to biological studies.
About Proteins
Proteins are the nanoscale machinery of all the known cellular life. Amazingly, these large biomolecules with up to 100,000 atoms fold into unique three-dimensional shapes in which they function. These functions include all cellular chemistry (metabolism), energy conversion (photosynthesis) and transport (oxygen transport), signal processing in the brain (neurons), immune response and many others, often with an efficiency unmatched by any man-made process. Protein malfunction is often related to diseases and thousands disease-related proteins have been identified to date, many with still unknown structure. To understand, control or even design proteins we need to study protein structure, which is experimentally much harder to obtain than the information about the chemical composition (sequence) of a specific protein.
So what exactly is different to other protein folding projects?
POEM@HOME implements a novel approach to understand these aspects of protein structure, which lends itself very well to worldwide distributed computing. The scientific approach behind POEM@HOME is a computational realization of the thermodynamic hypothesis that won C. B. Anfinsen the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1972.
The novel approach
C. B. Anfinsen got the 1972 Nobel prize in chemistry for the observation that proteins are in thermodynamic equilibrium with their environment. This means that the free energy of a protein, which depends on the coordinates, assumes its minimum over all conformations in the biologically active conformation.
POEM (Protein Optimization with free Energy Methods) (key results) is strategy for in-silico reproducible and predictive protein folding and protein tertiary structure prediction on the basis of thermodynamic hypothesis. Since 1999 we have developed all-atom biophysical forcefields (PFF01,PFF02) and efficient stochastic optimization techniques for:
- protein folding,
- protein-structure prediction,
- protein-protein interactions,
- proteins in non-physiological environments.
So why POEM?
POEM@HOME is a purely academic, non-profit project to improve our understanding of biomolecular structure and function. All substantial result of POEM@HOME will be published in international peer reviewed journals with proper credit to the POEM@HOME volunteers.
By joining this project you will contribute to a computational approach to:
- predict the biologically active structure of proteins
- understandthe signal-processing mechanisms when the proteins interact with one another
- understand diseases related to protein malfunction or aggregation
- develop new drugs on the basis of the three-dimensions structure of biologically important proteins.
So please help us, by joining POEM@HOME, solve the scientific mysteries described above and decipher the biological information encoded in proteins of unknown structure.
Final note: This is a fairly new project and as such can play up a little. For now i would call it a Beta project.