I haven't been a member of this project for very long, yet I would like to see some results of the contributed work. From my understanding (Please correct if wrong." it is an image that gets created from the results, 8 low res 2 high? ok, I know that I would be willing to to spare some harddrive space for a copy of one of those images. A jpeg for instance, so when I am going through the results I can say "Hmmmn, wonder what that one came out to be? And ppof there it is, this weird thing that I dont understand but love to make.

Also I think it would be cool if the project designers had little blurbs about the different units we down load, for instance, currently right now I am working on 1n0u__abrelaxmode_random_length15_jitter02_28521_1 , now that seems like something preety cool. What is it and why are we testing it? What is its purpose? Is it a set of someone?

Oh one last useless thought. This will sounds retarded, I dont have any clue about chemistry, please forgive me. HIV, is it not somekind of protein or chemical, I really dont know, But can we break it down into a DNA chain or specific set of amino acids, if we could break it down into chains, could we not attack certain chains of the virus or find a new protein that can attack an enzyme that the virus needs to survive.

Sorry for sounding like moron, so if thats not possible, please enlighten me, I am truly interested.

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Oh one last useless thought. This will sounds retarded, I dont have any clue about chemistry, please forgive me. HIV, is it not somekind of protein or chemical, I really dont know, But can we break it down into a DNA chain or specific set of amino acids, if we could break it down into chains, could we not attack certain chains of the virus or find a new protein that can attack an enzyme that the virus needs to survive.

Sorry for sounding like moron, so if thats not possible, please enlighten me, I am truly interested.

HIV is actually a retrovirus. A virus is technically not a living thing (or at least most people don't consider it to be alive). It uses the host's cell to make more copies of itself, in turn destorying the host cells. A retrovirus (as far as I can remember) uses RNA rather than DNA. You can do a google search on RNA and get the major differences between the two. In simplest form, the sugar back bone of RNA is different (ribose vs. deoxyribose).

Hope this is a) clear and b) correct. If not then can someone else jump in. It's been a while since my last bio class (and that was biological psychology).

Kathryn

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Kathryn :o)
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(and that was biological psychology).

Kathryn, would you email me offline? firstname dot lastname at comcast dott net - off-topic from BOINC but maybe ontopic for your profession...

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My research group works on designing new proteins as well as predicting protein structures. We are currently working hard on approaches to designing a vaccine for HIV. we aren't currently running any vaccine design calculations on boinc, but very likely we will be doing this in the future, and we will certainly let you know when this happens.

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Being just a layman in the world of biology, I was interested in this article posted on Slashdot: "Gene Found In Black Death Survivors Stops HIV"

Would this be the kind of thing that "designing new proteins" would use as a starting point? Or is this just something that the news people have hyped and, in reality, isn't very useful?

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