The Legit Reviews Folding Team (#38296) has reached another major milestone today as it has surpassed the 55 million point barrier. The team currently has 48 active members with 307 processors running daily, which is impressive. The team members have contributed over 142,000 work units over the past 4.5 years and every single one helps researchers. I remember that it took over a year to reach one million points back in 2005, but the team is cranking through roughly 6 million points a month! If you have some spare CPU or GPU cycles that you'd like to share with the team we'd love to have you as a member in 2009! head on to the forums to meet the team and figure out how to get started!
The influenza hemagglutinin protein performs several important functions, including attaching the virus to cells it will infect and releasing the viral genome into the interior of the cell. Most protective antibodies against influenza also bind to the hemagglutinin protein. We wish to understand how mutations to hemagglutinin affect viral function, including what keeps avian influenza (“bird flu”) from being readily transmissible between humans. In this paper, we have applied a technique from information theory known as mutual information to genetic sequence data to predict important mutation sites on the hemagglutinin protein. In follow-up work, we are combining this technique with other methods to refine these predictions and test some of them using Folding@Home.
