Fold with Kitguru – best performer wins a mystery prize

Kitguru has been open 7 months now and many forum members wanted to have a folding team operating. While I know some of our forum guys will do this without any ‘rewards' I wanted to help try and push this myself, as it is such a good cause.

Therefore, I am offering a very nice prize to the highest folder at the end of March 2011. Right now I want to keep this prize a secret, but rest assured it won't be something disappointing like a keyboard or mouse. I am talking in the price range of a high end video card or processor. I may even hand out a few other prizes to people who are trying hard, but don't have the high end hardware to compete for top position.

What is Folding@Home?

You can help scientists studying these diseases by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

Protein folding is linked to disease, such as Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

What is protein folding?
Proteins are biology's workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

If you want to take part in this then head over to our forums here and sign up. Remember, above all else, this is for a good cause and worth your time.

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