Folding@Home

Where mitochondria are biology's "power plants", proteins are biology's work house. Before proteins can do their job, they must "fold" into the right shape. The actual process under which this happens is poorly understood. By downloading and running a small program, you can help shed light on this process, and help in curing many well known diseases like alzheimers and cancer.

Folding@Home, unfortunately, will not help in the research for a cure of mitochondrial disease directly, but it's benefits are two-fold. Cell biology is very complicated and our understanding still crude. The more we know about cell biology the better cell biologists we will have. Folding@Home improves the rate at which we improve our understanding. Furthermore, it aids research into therapy for many symptoms of mitochondrial diseases.

As well as actually doing the science, we can use Folding@Home to promote our cause by joining our Folding@Home team. Our team page contains a link back to our websites. The larger our team, the more points we generate and the higher up the list we appear. The higher up the list we appear, the more traffic we get, the more traffic we get, the more awareness we raise. We strongly encourage you and may, in certain instances, even resort to begging you, to join our team.

Our Folding@Home team name is MitoDisease. Our number, which you will be asked for when you install the programme, is 121874 (please note, you will not appear in the team statistics until you have completed at least one work unit. Not appearing immediately is normal.)

Already in a team and want to switch to ours but don't know how to do it? It's easy. Simply navigate to the folder on your computer where Folding@Home is intalled and open the file called "client.cfg" in a text editor like notepad (windows) or Vim (Linux), change the number next to "team=" to 121874. That's it - you don't even need to restart your client!