This is from the folding blog. For comparison:It's exciting to see how far we've come. One way to think about it is in terms of how long of a time scale and length scale we can simulate for protein folding and protein misfolding diseases (such as Aß aggregation in Alzheimer's Disease):
Time scales: advancing roughly 1000x every 5 years
2000: 1 to 10ns (Fs peptide)
2005: 1 to 10µs (villin, Aß aggregation of 4 chains)
2010: 1 to 10ms (NTL9, Lambda repressor)
2015: 1 to 10s?
Just breaking past a microsecond was a big deal. The fact that we can simulate 10's of milliseconds is very exciting, but I'm really excited about where this appears to be leading, allowing us to tackle really challenging and important problems. It would also mean that through a combination of new methods, algorithms, and hardware advances, we've already increased our capabilities by a million fold in just 10 years (2000 to 2010). We're looking forward to hopefully making it a billion fold in 2015!
Length scales: advancing roughly 2x every 5 years
2000: 16 amino acids (Fs)
2005: 35 amino acids (villin)
2010: 80 amino acids (lambda, ACBP)
2015: 160 amino acids?
It's also important to note that these are sizes for protein folding. For other problems, such as protein conformational change, we've already tackled much bigger systems.
I'm really excited to see what the next 5 years will bring!
Abeta: 36–43 amino acids (protein involved with Alzheimers)
Immunoglobin: 70-110 amino acids (our body's antibodies)
Alpha-synuclein: 140 amino acids (most common size of the protein, linked to Parkinson's disease)
P53: 393 amino acids (prevents cancer, also called the 'protein suppressor')
Huntingtin: 3144 amino acids (You guessed it, linked to Huntington's disease)
Titin: 34,350 amino acids (largest protein, name refers to 'titan')
I couldn't find anything about the folding time scale of proteins, but I do know several proteins can take seconds to fold. Maybe someone can help me here?
FAH is well on its way to able to simulate proteins like P53 and Alpha-synuclein. Others, like Huntingtin, still seem a while away (which doesn't mean they aren't doin any Huntington research). Which proteins is the PG planning to tacke in the next few years? P53?
Folding@Home is really advancing rapidly, I can't wait to hear more