Fold It - A Game with a Serious Impact and We Can all contribute by "Folding Proteins" from our Home Computers...

You set up a profile and play against others on the Internet..."The more we know about how certain proteins fold, the better new proteins we can design to combat the disease-related proteins and cure the diseases.". The project has been given a grant of 20 Million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation...the project was covered on NSNBC a while back as well....

Contribute to research on Malaria, Anthrax, HIC, Alzheimer's and much more...more information and the download of the software is located here...and donates computer power to the project...something like peer to peer in a related fashion, but the big difference here is the research and studies created to save lives and fight disease...it can be done from an X-Box as well....

"We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!" Read more here....

The Game is sponsored and hosted by the University of Washington..."by running the Rosetta program on your computer while you don't need it, it will help speed up the extend research in ways not possible before..BD

"We're hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it's done by," enthused Foldit co-creator Zoran Popovic. "Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize." Baker says his 13-year-old son is faster at folding proteins than he is."We're trying to use the brain power of people all around the world to advance biomedical research."

The concept is quite simple at the gaming point of view where you try to make the protein fold in the best way possible with points being given for stability through hydrogen bonding, compacting, hydrophobic and hydrophilic positioning of lateral protein chains, etc. The “better” you fold your protein, the more points you achieve.
These conformations are registered by the software and then processed furthermore thus contributing to the overall effort of predicting protein folding and therefore solving puzzles for science!
Knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to target it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). "Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins."