I have exciting news. We and the University of Washington are starting up a new Institute for Protein Design to design new proteins to address current challenges in medicine, energy, and other areas. You can learn more about the institute at http://depts.washington.edu/ipd/. Rosetta@home is and will continue to be a critical part of our efforts. For every new potential protein therapeutic we design, we use Rosetta@home to test whether it will actually fold into the desired structure. And we need help! We have quite a backlog of exciting new designed proteins to test on Rosetta@home because we are designing proteins for quite a range of problems-new anti flu proteins, anti-cancer proteins, and new materials--and it takes 3000-5000 work units to test each one. This Rosetta@home testing is becoming the slow step in the whole design process, often taking over 10 days to complete. So please tell your friends and relations to join us!

A generous donor has provide funds which we want to use to invite 5-10 Rosetta@home participants to visit the Institute and see what we are trying to accomplish first hand. More on this in my next post.