Home > iSGTW 26 November 2008
Issue 102: iSGTW 26 November 2008
|
| Starting on World AIDS Day on 1 December, the World Community Grid will sponsor a month-long challenge via its FightAIDS@home project, with the goal of increasing the number of computers and computer cycles available to researchers conducting HIV/AIDS research.
Like all molecules, HIV—the virus that causes AIDS—is dependent upon its three-dimensional shape to attack the human immune system, in much the same way that a key must fit into a lock in order to gain entry. If the lock can be blocked—with a drug, for example—then the key cannot fit, and the virus is prevented from maturing. Such blockers, known as “protease inhibitors,” are one way of avoiding the onset of AIDS.
Researchers have been able to determine by trial-and-error the shapes of a “lock” and a “key” separately, but not always for the two together. If scientists knew how a drug molecule fits inside the active site of its target, chemists could see how they could design even better blockers, more potent than existing ones.
At the laboratory of Arthur Olson in the molecular biology department at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, computational methods are used to identify new candidates for drugs with the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV. Known as “Structure-Based Drug Design,” this approach requires vast computational resources.Read more  |
|
|
We constantly hear of terms such as “GigaFLOPS” (the FLOPS part of the acronym refers to FLoating-point Operations Per Second). It sure sounds like a lot. But just how big is a petaflop, really? | | | |  Image of the week True to life 
When architects bid on a contract for a new client, a lot depends on how realistic their design looks—and how quickly they can get it in. Read more |
|
|
 |
 |
Headlines | Site Map
