Engaging with the computer-savvy YouTube masses, this clip promoting Rosetta@home makes an outstanding case for its cause; it had soared past 19,800 views when this iSGTW was published. Screenshot courtesy of YouTube

The Rosetta@home volunteer computing project has created a superb communication tool in this popular YouTube flick. At the time of publishing this issue of iSGTW, the video had already soared past 19,800 views.

At just under seven minutes long, the clip covers everything from DNA to interplanetary exploration, but more importantly, it takes the Rosetta@home message to a computer-savvy public.

Neatly explaining the challenges of protein folding and the benefits of research enabled by Rosetta@home, the video also underlines the philosophy and theory of distributed computing, encouraging viewers to become involved with the project.

The video was produced by Laura Lynn Gonzalez and covers research conducted at the University of Washington’s Baker Lab.

What is Rosetta@home?

Rosetta@home is a BOINC-powered volunteer computing project that uses spare computing cycles to determine the three-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. Volunteers can run the Rosetta program on their idle computers to help speed and extend this research, which aims to design new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, malaria, cancer and Alzheimer’s.

Rosetta is also running on Open Science Grid; for more on this please check out our earlier article in iSGTW.