Here's a guest post from Prof. Xuhui Huang's lab at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, another collaborating labortory in the Folding@home consortium. Prof. Huang and his lab have made several important methodological applications to FAH (for more details, see this review article) as well as important research into the molecular nature of Huntington's Disease. Here's an update from Prof. Huang:
In the past a couple of years, the FAH has greatly helped us on our research on understanding the mechanisms of the molecular recognition processes. Molecular recognition, such as enzymes need to recognize their substrates and drugs have to be designed to specifically bind to certain receptors, is crucial to biology and medicine. Experimentally probing the chemical details of molecular recognition events is challenging, while computer simulations have the potential to provide a detailed picture of such events. With the help of the FAH donors, we are performing large-scale simulations on a group of Periplasmic Binding Proteins aiming to reveal the general relationships between protein structures, its intrinsic dynamics, and mechanism of recognition process.
The FAH projects related to the above research are between 7700 and 7712. We greatly appreciate the help from all the FAH donors, beta testers, and the rest of the FAH team to make our research on molecular recognition possible.
