David Baker (U. Washington / HHMI): Crowd Sourcing Protein Folding: Rosetta@Home and FoldIt HD

http://www.ibiology.org/ibiomagazine/david-baker-crowd-sourcing-science.html Talk Overview: Foldit is an interactive protein folding program that allows individuals to work with sequences to predict the most likely fold for a protein. Foldit users have designed algorithms to improve computational protein folding, determined optimal sequences for protein structures that have been verified experimentally, and created new proteins based on experimental or design parameters. Anyone can participate by downloading Foldit at http://fold.it Speaker Biography: David Baker is the Head of the Institute for Protein Design and a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Washington, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His research utilizes both experimental and computational methods to study the design of protein structures, and the mechanisms of protein folding, protein-protein and protein-small molecule interactions. Baker has won numerous awards and honors for his work, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences. His lab developed the crowdsourced protein folding design programs Rosetta@home (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/) and Foldit (http://fold.it/portal/ ).