Link to our Folding@home grid

http://folding.stanford.edu/ when following this link you can download the folding@home grid which will run during the idle time on your computer. The grid does not cause your computer to slow down and downloading the grid is a way in which you can help to find treatments, cures, or other information about diseases without being time consuming.

Our topic for our grid is antibiotic resistance and evolution. When bacteria encounter antibiotics those that are resistant to the antibiotic survive. Those that survive then reproduce and the new strain of the bacteria is then all resistant to the antibiotic that was previously used to fight off the bacteria. One of the major causes of antibiotic resistance is that medications are not completely finished. When they are not finished not all of the bacteria are killed and they therefore have time to mutate and reproduce. This is when antibiotic resistance becomes a problem.

Folding@home grid description

For our service learning project we are running Folding@home which looks at how protein folding or misfolding leads to related diseases. Diseases such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes are all caused by proteins that do not fold correctly. Folding@home is looking to find the exact causes and ways to cure these diseases based on the way that the related proteins fold.