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Published online 16 October 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/449765a
The shape of protein structures to come
Modelling effort uses mass computing power to make breakthrough.
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This is an important breakthrough but the field of structural biology is poorly represented with mention to just the technique of X-ray crystallography as a means to experimentally determine high resolution structures of proteins. For a protein of 112 aa NMR is just as good.
"Each home computer works in isolation, he explains. If the program could be rewritten to run on the many parallel processors in a supercomputer, Rosetta might become considerably more powerful." Looks like this has already been done: http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR110106_casp.html
Nice article. I agree with your statement that determining how a protein folds is "a horrendous problem to model." I am currently a student and my Biology class is able to determine the tertiary structure of a protein through the use of a toober!