Fold with Kitguru (Team 196420) – feel good and win goodies

With 2010 almost at a close, it seems a good time to remind everyone that our very giving community started Folding only a very short time ago, and their progress has been phenomenal, even in such a short space of time.

When I initially announced that KitGuru had an official folding team I was offering a very nice prize to the top performer. On reflection I am going to give away 3 prizes now. Why? Well some users won't have the powerful high end hardware to compete for top position, however I still want to reward those of our community who put hard work and their valued time into this. Therefore at the end of March, after I discuss with our folding moderator AgencyMan (aka Bruce) freebies will be given to the community.

The prizes are not being made public yet, but trust me when I say they are very nice indeed – they will be coming from my personal stash of hardware and at least one of them will be a high end video card. After the prizes are handed out in March, I plan on giving more away in the summer to the most active and giving members of the KitGuru folding team.

Some of the community I already know will be doing this for no reward, but I want to let you all know that I appreciate your time and the fact that you all are trying hard to help such a good cause. If we can keep climbing the ranks and helping this fantastic research then we will all feel much better … after all what better use is there for modern day hardware?

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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