Human Proteonome Folding, Phase 2, рассчет структуры белков в человеческом теле Налаштування

[Rilian]

Human Proteome Folding Project
Phase 2

Официальные результаты проекта
Активные эксперименты
Human Microbiome Project - официальный сайт

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~rb133/wcg/thread_2010_03_10.html

Как присоединиться читайте в главном топике World Community Grid

Proteins are essential to living beings. Just about everything in the human body involves or is made out of proteins.

What are proteins?
Proteins are large molecules that are made of long chains of smaller molecules called amino acids. While there are only 20 different kinds of amino acids that make up all proteins, sometimes hundreds of them make up a single protein.

Adding to the complexity, proteins typically do not stay as long chains. As soon as the chain of amino acids is built, the chain folds and tangles up into a more compact and particular shape that lets it conduct specific and necessary functions within the human body.

Proteins fold because the different amino acids like to stick to each other following certain rules. Imagine that amino acids are pop-beads of 20 different colors. The pop-beads are sticky, but sticky in such a way that only certain combinations of colors can stick together. This makes the amino acid chains fold in a particular way that creates proteins that are useful to the human body. Human cells have mechanisms to help the proteins fold properly and, equally important, mechanisms to get rid of improperly folded proteins.

How do proteins relate to human genes?
The collection of all of the human genes is known as "the human genome." Depending on how the genes are counted, there are over 30,000 genes in the human genome. Each gene, which is a section of a long chain known as DNA, dictates how to build the chain of amino acids for one of the 30,000 proteins. In recent years, scientists were able to map the sequence for each human gene. This means that we now know the sequence of amino acids in all of the human proteins. Thus, the human genome is directly related to the "human proteome," the collection of all human proteins.

The protein mystery
While researchers have learned a great deal about the human proteome, the functions of most of the proteins remain a mystery. The genes do not reveal exactly how the proteins will fold into their final shape, which is critical because that determines what a protein can do and what other proteins it can connect to or interact with.

Proteins are like puzzle pieces. For example, muscle proteins connect to each other to form a muscle fiber. They join together in a specific manner because of their shape, as well as other factors relating to the shape.

Everything that goes on in cells and in the body is very specifically controlled by the shape of the proteins that do or do not let proteins interlock with other proteins. For example, the proteins of a virus or bacteria may have particular shapes that enable it to break through the cell membrane, allowing it to infect the cell.

The Human Proteome Folding Project
Знания структуры белков позволит ученым понять как белки выполняют свои биологические функции, а также как болезни блокируют белки от выполнения необходимых функций для поддержания здоровых клеток

The Human Proteome Folding Project will combine the power of millions of computers in a grid to help scientists understand how human proteins fold. The work to be done in this monumental task is shared across this grid, so that results can be achieved far sooner than would be possible with conventional supercomputers. With a greater understanding of protein structure, scientists can learn how diseases work and ultimately find cures for them.

When your grid agent is running, it is folding an amino acid chain in various ways and evaluating how well each folding follows the specific rules of how specific amino acids stick together or not. As computers try millions of ways to fold the chains, they attempt to fold the protein in the same way that it actually folds in the human body. The best shapes identified for each protein are returned to the scientists for further study.



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Це повідомлення відредагував Rilian: Feb 4 2011, 00:23

[Rilian]

Пресс-релиз от 28 октября 2009

HPF2 Update - November 2009

Greetings WCG Volunteers,

As the first World Community Grid project, we'd like to celebrate the WCG's anniversary with a recap of all the contributions to protein science that your work as made. Over the past few years, WCG volunteers have provided over 50,000 CPU years (as calculated by the WCG) and folded over tens of thousands of protein sequences. Often there is very little known about the sequences we've folded, and WCG protein structure predictions provide the only available annotations for scientists studying these proteins. Biologists from different disciplines have used our structure predictions to make informed decisions about experiments and infer protein functions and molecular processes.

In the early stages of our project, an effort was made to make focused predictions for proteins of interest. The yeast proteome was originally targeted for the vast amount of other experimental data available.

Публикация Malmström L, Riffle M., Strauss CEM, Chivian, D, Davis TN., Bonneau R.3 and Baker D. Superfamily Assignments for the Yeast Proteome through Integration of Structure Prediction with the Gene Ontology. PLoS Biol. (2007) Apr;5(4):e76.
We predicted protein structures to further annotate this genome and compliment the array of protein interaction and molecular function information on this heavily studied model organism. Our results confirmed the feasibility of extending our approach to other less studied, larger proteomes.

A cross section of organisms (including Human, Mouse, Fly, E.Coli, Worm, and other unique organisms) have been processed completely, and protein sequences of unknown structure have been folded by the WCG. Our database has grown to include over a million protein sequences, and WCG predictions are complimented by known structures and a host of other structure and sequence metrics. We regularly receive special requests for predictions for proteins of varying kind (including but not limited to those related to HIV infection, the development of Malaria, and particular bacterial enzymatic processes).

A few high profile uses of our database include:

Публикация Bonneau, R, Facciotti, MT, Reiss, DJ, Madar A,, Baliga, NS, et al. A predictive model for transcriptional control of physiology in a free living cell. (2007) Cell. Dec 131:1354-1365.
Here we used our structure predictions to find transcription factors, the proteins that turn on and off genes. These predicted transcription factors proved critical (and accurate) in building the genome wide circuit for this organism. The general application here is environmental bioengineering and systems biology.

Публикация Mike Boxem, Zoltan Maliga, Niels J. Klitgord, Na Li, Irma Lemmens, Miyeko Mana, Lorenzo De Lichtervelde, Joram Mul, Diederik van de Peut, Maxime Devos, Nicolas Si-monis, Anne-Lore Schlaitz, Murat Cokol, Muhammed A. Yildirim, Tong Hao, Changyu Fan, Chenwei Lin, Mike Tipsword, Kevin Drew, Matilde Galli, Kahn Rhrissorrakrai, David Drech-sel, David E. Hill, Richard Bonneau, Kristin C. Gunsalus, Frederick P. Roth, Fabio Piano, Jan Tavernier, Sander van den Heuvel, Anthony A. Hyman, Marc Vidal. A Protein Domain-Based Interactome Network for C. elegans Early Embryogenesis. (2008) Cell, 134(3) pp. 534 - 545.
Here our predictions were used to map the boundaries between functional parts of proteins. This allows for a whole new way of looking at how proteins interact and co-function to form a working system that the cell relies on. The general application here is broad, as this describes a dataset all types of biologists will use.

Публикация Andersen-Nissen E, Smith KD, Bonneau R, Strong RK, Aderem A. A conserved surface on Toll-like receptor 5 recognizes bacterial flagellin. (2007) J Exp Med. Feb 19;204(2):393-403.
Here we predicted the structure of key immune proteins, resulting in a prediction that allowed us to re-engineer a key imune receptor allowing for a better animal model of innate immune responses (key to figuring out several aspects of our response to bacterial infection). This publication has direct application to immunology and fighting infectious disease.

Recently, we've been working towards a paper that will describe our new methods, highlight our successes, and publicize the already open access to our database. This year we've received an average of 6,300 unique visitors a month. That's over 200 users a day (including weekends)! With the publication of our new methods we expect a significant increase in exposure and are preparing to provide multiple means of user-friendly access for the sometimes complex data. This will include using BioNetBuilder.

Публикация Iliana Avila-Campillo, Kevin Drew, John Lin, David J. Reiss, Richard Bonneau. BioNetBuilder, an automatic network interface. (2007) Bioinformatics. Feb 1;23(3):392-3.

Future work will undoubtedly involve the refinement of our protein structure annotations. We're investigating methods for incorporating evolutionary information into our predictions, and overhauling parts of the pipeline that are outdated. There is significant room for improvement in our methods for selecting native-state conformations from structure predictions and assigning family annotations. With the WCG we've been able to cast a wide net, and now we're interested in the improvement of our algorithms and classifiers. WCG predictions will continue to provide data for our ever improving experiments and value to the scientific community.

Here at the Bonneau Lab, we thank you for your dedication to science and ask that you keep crunching!
--
Patrick Winters
Bonneau Lab

Как видно с помощью проекта Human Proteonome Folding, Phase 2 за полгода было сделано много исследований и 5 публикаций