Susume Lv 1
Here is an excellent article by Ian Haydon (whom some of us met at the alflatoxin event in San Francisco) about work the Baker Lab and colleagues have done designing novel peptide rings. (Peptides are strings of amino acids just like proteins, but shorter and less structured. In addition to the amino acids we are familiar with in foldit, they can include D-amino acids, which are mirror images of the ones found in proteins.) The team used Rosetta@home running on volunteers' smartphones for the number crunching, and adapted an algorithm from robotics to predict how the peptides could fold.