First results from Folding@Home cancer project published.
We have been studying the p53 tumor surpressor and our first results on p53 have recently been published. To our knowledge, this is the first peer-reviewed results from a distributed computing project related to cancer. Thanks to the continued support of FAH donors, this is will be just the first of many cancer related works that will come from FAH.
The nature of our results can best be described in our paper. However, here's a brief summary of our results. Roughly half of all known cancers result from mutations in p53. Our first work in the cancer area examines the tetramerization domain of p53. We predict how p53 folds and in doing so, we can predict which amino acid mutations would be relevant. When compared with experiments, our predictions have appeared to agree with experiment and give a new interpretation to existing data.
Dimerization of the p53 Oligomerization Domain: Identification of a Folding Nucleus by Molecular Dynamics Simulations Journal of Molecular Biology, Volume 345, Issue 4 , 28 January 2005, Pages 869-878 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2004.10.083