Folding Forum

Hello, all! I should preface this post with a warning: I'm a trained musician and the breadth of my scientific knowledge includes only a survey of college biology and chemistry. I know precious little about this stuff, but I'm very curious about doing what I can to help cure these insidious prion diseases.

This afternoon I discovered an article at Science Daily outlining the study of prion misfolding within the cell membrane. According to the article, all previous prion research has been conducted in solution and not using actual animal cells. Does this impact the efficacy and usefulness of our Folding At Home findings? Are Professors Gerwert and Riesner aware of the FAH results available to date? Could there be a way to extend an offer of our resources to their laboratory?

Because I am a new member, I cannot post the web location of the article outlining the study. Here is its APA citation sans web address :

Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum (2008, August 11). Investigation Of Prion Folding On Cell Membranes. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 14, 2008

We're not working on prions, but folding near a membrane can be interesting. In general, for the proteins we are interested in, the membrane issues aren't the critical ones, so it's not a high priority for us at the moment.

Thanks for the clarification, Dr. Pande!