Maximum PC

Results page updated – new key result published in our work in Alzheimer's Disease
We have made a major update to the Results page on the Folding@home web site. We now list 95 papers that have directly resulted from Folding@home, although we note that there are 193 papers from the Pande group in general. There are many new results to talk about, but I will just highlight a few below.

One major result is in the area of Alzheimer's Disease (paper #95). It is believed that Alzheimer's Disease results from the misfolding of the Abeta peptide. Understanding how Abeta misfolds could give us some key insights into how to cure Alzheimer's Disease. This paper experimentally tests a key prediction made in an earlier paper (paper #58: "Simulating oligomerization at experimental concentrations and long timescales: A Markov state model approach" by Nicholas W. Kelley, V. Vishal, Grant A. Krafft, and Vijay S. Pande. J. Chem. Phys. 129, 214707 (2008); DOI:10.1063/1.3010881). In this paper, we show experimentally that there appears to be a beta turn in the Abeta as predicted. This leads to a very stable form of misfolded Abeta which could be used as a starting point for a new Alzheimer's therapy. We are heavily pursuing this research direction at the moment.

Another key result is in the area of methods (paper #93). We are constantly honing our methods to improve Folding@home's ability to predict the behavior of proteins. This paper demonstrates the current state of the art in terms of both sampling and analysis. When compared to detailed TTET experiments, we show that our methods can piece out even fairly detailed aspects of folding. However, we also see the ways in which our models are not perfect, suggesting how we can improve our methods even further.

We'll highlight other papers as time goes on. I'm particuarly excited about these results. In particular, the results from paper #95 were first discovered several years ago, but we carried out several followup studies to verify them, etc. As always, I'm most excited about what we're doing now and hope to get some of our current key results in theses areas out from peer review soon.

2012 Michael and Kate Bárány Award
I have some good news. Due in large part to the work we've done with Folding@home, I've been named the recipient of the 2012 Michael and Kate Bárány Award for Young Investigators from the Biophysical Society for "developing field-defining and field-changing computational methods to produce leading theoretical models for protein and RNA folding." This was just annouced in the Biophysics Society newsletter and their web site hasn't been updated just yet for the 2012 awards.

As with all of the accolades coming to our work, this is very much a team effort, and I'm excited that our collective work is being well-recognized.