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!
A big thanks to everyone on the team past and present to make this happen.
Some research papers have recently been published as well, so our work is making a difference in the scientific community! Two of the most recent papers were published in January 2009, so they are cranking out the data fairly quickly. One is on Huntington's Disease and the other is on Influenza, so keep your fingers crossed that the our help with folding will help them understand mutations and the way proteins work to fight these killers.
The predicted structure of the headpiece of the Huntingtin protein and its implications for Huntington's Disease - link
It's still early (since this paper was just accepted), but I wanted to give FAH donors a heads up on our work on Huntington's Disease aggregation, which is just about to come out in the Journal of Molecular Biology. I'll comment on it more in a future post.
Computational screen to identify important mutations in influenza - Link
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.
Just would like to give congrats to skierkid450 for passing 500K F@H! 
