Welcome to FUNCRYPTA, the tardigrade project funded by the BMBF Framework Programme "Biotechnologie - Chancen nutzen und gestalten", "QuantPro - Quantitative Analyse zur Beschreibung dynamischer Prozesse in lebenden Systemen". The scientific objectives of FUNCRYPTA are:(i) to identify genes, enzymes and their products, whose value for stabilizing cells has been documented, on entering, during and after the anhydrobiotic stage in tardigrades, ii) to relate known dynamic cellular procedures during the anhydrobiotic stage in order to understand the background of anhydrobiotic changes, and(iii) to develop mathematical methods to understand and quantify mechanisms, dynamics and driving forces of anhydrobiosis in order to predict changes and to provide a scientific baseline for further investigation and development of products required to stabilize cells. ... [Information of the supplier]
Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases. Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery. Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved. We have had several successes. You can read about them on our Science page, on our Awards page, or go directly to our Results page. ... [Information of the supplier, modified]