Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 16 October 2007 | Nature 449, 765 (2007) | doi:10.1038/449765a
News
The shape of protein structures to come
Modelling effort uses mass computing power to make breakthrough.
By exploiting millions of hours of computing time donated by the users of 150,000 home computers, scientists have predicted the structure of a protein using just its sequence of amino acids. The project marks a significant advance in a field that's been flush with hope yet short on tangible results, experts say.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
This is an important breakthrough but the field of structural biology is poorly represented with mention to just the technique of X-ray crystallography as a means to experimentally determine high resolution structures of proteins. For a protein of 112 aa NMR is just as good.
"Each home computer works in isolation, he explains. If the program could be rewritten to run on the many parallel processors in a supercomputer, Rosetta might become considerably more powerful." Looks like this has already been done: http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR110106_casp.html
Nice article. I agree with your statement that determining how a protein folds is "a horrendous problem to model." I am currently a student and my Biology class is able to determine the tertiary structure of a protein through the use of a toober!