California - Thousands of desktop computers have resolved a long-standing biological puzzle, in a breakthrough in simultaneous data processing, a British journal reported on Wednesday.
A team led by Vijay Pande of Stanford University in California put out a call in 2000 for computer owners to make idle machines available to crack a monster of a problem: how the atoms of a protein cause it to fold into a 3D knot.
Understanding this could help drugs designers come up with molecules to attack Alzheimer's disease and the human form of mad-cow disease, both of which are caused by misfolding, rogue proteins.
Pande's project, dubbed Folding@home, assembled 200 000 volunteers, who each downloaded a programme which swung into action after their computer had been idle for a certain time, the journal reported.
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'It's a big breakthrough' The software comprised a swirling screensaver and a data analysis programme, which worked its way through a specific number-crunching task set by Folding@home. When the results were completed, they were then sent back to Folding@home via the Internet.
The average daily task set by each computer was to simulate, atom by atom, a millionth of a second of protein folding.
In total, it took 2 000 years of computer time to crack.
Several supercomputers, working together, could have addressed the same problem, but even this would have taken a lot of time. These super-brains are also very expensive and scientists usually have limited access to them.
"It's a big breakthrough," Stanford's protein structure researcher Michael Levitt, explained.
'Trying to anticipate how the many atoms within a protein interact is a mind-bending problem' Proteins are sequences of amino acids that not only comprise the body's tissues but also play the role of builder, repairer and messenger, teaming up with other proteins to do so.
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