iSGTW Image of the week - Shave hundreds of years off your research life

Image of the week - Shave hundreds of years off your research life The villin protein is presented here in two superimposed forms: the first predicted using BEMusE on EU-IndiaGrid, and the second measured experimentally. The similarity demonstrates the algorithm’s accuracy.Image courtesy of Stefano Cozzini, EU-IndiaGrid BEMusE— or the Bias-Exchange Metadynamics Submission Environment—is a grid-enabled tool able to fold a 36-residue protein in less than a year of single CPU time: a vast improvement on the hundreds or thousands of CPU years required by other grid-based techniques.Bedazzling researchers with its accuracy and speed, BEMusE scooped the poster prize at December’s eScience 2007 conference.Biased towards gridBEMusE evolved from the Bias-Exchange Metadynamics algorithm, developed by Alessandro Laio and Stefano Piana, which folds proteins with increased accuracy. “It was immediately clear how much the algorithm would benefit from the grid,” says BEMusE researcher Stefano Cozzini, of Democ