I found this on Wikipedia while reading the info on Rosetta on Wikipedia.
Here's some links and a small quote from the Folding@home's page on Wikipedia. This should generate some interesting discussion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40home
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta%40home
Folding@home vs. Rosetta@home
Quote from Mr. Vijay Pande http://forum.folding-community.org/viewtopic.php?p=125338#125338
I know Baker and Ranganathan and their work very well and (like the rest of the protein community) find their work very important and impressive. However, Rosetta@home and Folding@Home are addressing very different problems.
Rosetta only predicts the final folded state, not how do proteins fold (and Rosetta has nothing to do with protein misfolding). Thus, those methods are not useful for the questions we're interested in and the diseases we're tackling (Alzheimer's Disease and other aggregation related diseases).
Also, one should note that accurate computational protein structure prediction is still very challenging compared to what one can do experimentally, whereas the information obtained from Folding@home on the nature of folding and misfolding pathways matches experiment (eg with quantitative validation in rates, free energy, etc) and then goes beyond what experiment can tell us in that arena. While Rosetta has gone a long way and is a very impressive project, given the choice between a Rosetta predicted structure and a crystal structure, one would always chose the crystal structure. I bet that will be changing due to their great efforts, but that may still be a ways off for that dream to be realized.
So, both are valuable projects IMHO, but addressing very different questions. I think there are some misunderstandings out there, though. Some people think FAH is all about structure prediction (which it is not -- that's Rosetta's strength) and some think Rosetta is about misfolding related disease (which it's not, that's Folding@Home's strength). Hopefully this post helps straighten some of that out.
____________
| 
