How many ways can you tie a piece of string?


This picture shows 72 different patterns using one loop.  Now imagine if that loop was not necessarily a loop, but could have the ends unconnected.  Or if you were allowed to tie on an extra piece of string ... the possibilities become enormous.  Now imagine that the piece of string is made from a variety of sections, like the patchwork quilt of the string world, where some parts are thick, others thin, some like Velcro, others oily and sleek.

‘What a magical piece of string it would be’ I hear you cry, well this is similar to what protein biologists have to deal with everyday. Proteins. They make up a lot of our body mass, and we use them for clever things like muscles, organs, bones and blood, and without them we cannot function.

We often cannot function with them either - and here my string analogy slowly comes into play. In your cells the DNA builds every protein for your body. The cells act as string factories, reading the DNA patterns and turning them into long threads of protein. The proteins then have to be knotted or folded into shape or they are useless - If we were all made of flat strands we would be about as robust as a packet of dry spaghetti.  Protein strands go to protein folding chambers and get themselves kitted out for action. A correctly folded protein can carry oxygen, break up starch, fight disease, and even act as an internal postman. An incorrectly folded protein will drop your important body-message in a puddle and get bitten by a dog, stopping for a drink with invading bacteria, and forgetting that it was supposed to be carrying that oxygen molecule to your brain.

Thanks to the HGP, we now know the entire human genome - so we know the DNA blueprint for pretty much any protein-string you desire. Now if we could work out how these protein-strings fold, we could manufacture them and make a lot of people very happy. Protein misfolding results in a wealth of diseases from cancer to brain degeneration, but if we knew how to give these people the correct protein or how to make their bodies fold them properly again, we could increase life expectancy massively.

Of course you’re wondering why I am telling you all this on a gaming site, well it’s all about Sony really. The other week Sony gave away free TVs to innocent bystanders, and now they are helping to improve our health care and future drug manufacture, evil little minxes that they are! You can jump on the band wagon by running Folding@home on your lovely new PS3 and help to hand out theoretical string to the nation. Folding@home is a program that runs on PCs and now PS3s, utilising the combined processing power of all those running it around the world to simulate how proteins fold.  How many more designs will the addition of PS3s allow them to generate for each protein? The more correct designs created, the closer we are to setting a list of rules for how proteins are folded by the body. Once we know how they are folded we could fold them artificially, and the possibilities become limitless. Our current set of folding rules are not complete enough for humans to work out protein structures from strings, but who needs a human when you have all the worlds PS3s and PCs on your side.  When you’re not participating in the world of next-gen super-gaming, your PS3 could secretly be folding proteins and discovering their sneaky designs for us. It’s like the really cool kid who collects stamps when no-one is looking.

When you’re not perfecting your driving skills, it’ll do the work of a 100 scientists; when you’re not collecting orbs, it’ll be helping to cure Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease; when you’re not drunkenly singing along to your favourite tunes, it’ll be discovering things that would otherwise cost the earth and take an eternity.  Ohhh that crafty little PS3, what will it be doing next? Turning its eye to world peace talks, sorting out global warming?  I caught mine trying to sneak off to third world countries to dig wells and clear land mines, but fortunately I stopped it.

If you want to join the Frag Dolls Folding team, download Folding@Home for either your PC or PS3, then go Identity and choose Join Existing Team.

The Frag Dolls Folding@Home team number is 58631.