Remember Folding@Home? It's a distributed computing network made up of hundreds of thousands of gamers the world over who donate their idle CPU and GPU cycles to simulate the folding of proteins to help fight Cancer, Malaria, Diabetes, and other dangerous diseases. With the threat of the Coronovirus spreading ever further, Folding@Home is now helping to figure out how it works and how we can best combat it. That's where you come in.
The Coronovirus, Covid-19, has "spikey" proteins on its exterior which help the virus bind to the lungs. It's those that Folding@Home needs to better understand to help fight it.
As the Folding@Home team put it in a chat with Sweclockers: "Proteins are not stagnant – they wiggle and fold and unfold to take on numerous shapes. We need to study not only one shape of the viral spike protein, but all the ways the protein wiggles and folds into alternative shapes in order to best understand how it interacts with the ACE2 receptor, so that an antibody can be designed."
And you can make a difference by donating your gaming PC's space cycles. All you need to do to join in is download the Folding@Home installer from the official site, here, and run it. It's that easy.
Image source: Centers of Disease Control and Prevention
