This thread is the fourth of a series where participants can discuss and ask questions about Dr. Baker's journal entries.

To reference discussions prior to this, see Discussion 4.

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Rosetta Informational Moderator: Mod.Zilla

Hello David.
It was interesting to see what is already 3 successful models, and not only one which was reported previously. But i have a supplementary question about the application of it:
If the protein was well designed and tightly bind to a target flu protein and block its work, why we are talking about using it only as a component for the diagnosis kits? But not directly - for treatment of flu? Or is it too mean, just in the more distant prospects of?
(As I understand the use of any new drug as a medicine is associated with long-term studies, tests, approvals, etc. While the use as diagnostics can be done fairly quickly, because no means long tests on animals and then humans, no risk to harm, etc)

Hello David.
It was interesting to see what is already 3 successful models, and not only one which was reported previously. But i have a supplementary question about the application of it:
If the protein was well designed and tightly bind to a target flu protein and block its work, why we are talking about using it only as a component for the diagnosis kits? But not directly - for treatment of flu? Or is it too mean, just in the more distant prospects of?
(As I understand the use of any new drug as a medicine is associated with long-term studies, tests, approvals, etc. While the use as diagnostics can be done fairly quickly, because no means long tests on animals and then humans, no risk to harm, etc)

You are absolutely right!! Since the time I wrote that post, our collaborators have obtained new data suggesting the designs may be useful as therapeutics. I'll post more on this as soon as the results are confirmed. you are also correct that the designs are pretty much ready to go now as diagnostics, but use as drugs would require a lot of testing which would take a long time to make sure they are safe, don't interact with other things in your body, etc.

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Thanks for the explanation and maintaining up to date information on project!

Good to hear that Gates is still supporting key research. Could you talk a bit more about how the dormant HIV situation differs from say curing me of an H1N1 infection? I'm thinking in one case you are targetting surface proteins and in the other you have to get within the cell first, hence the importance of "delivery" of the endonuclease that is devised.

Any updates on the carbon sequestration efforts? Or the biomass catalyst to break down cellulose into something that can be refined into fuel?

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Wow!! Congratulations to Dr. Jerome and his team! I hope I will be crunching some of his work units.

Congrats! Glad to see Rosetta@home being used for so many great projects on top of the research of developping RAH in the first place.

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Great news about the Influenza article and even better news about the further work on that virus!:D

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I think it would give a better first impression of the project if the posts in DB's Journal are posted on the front page in the News section - as it stands it just mentions an outage that was fixed ages ago, although looking at the home page you wouldn't realise that!

I would have thought that that's the sort of work a grad student could do without holding up the bakerlab team in their work.

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Hi dcdc, thanks for the suggestion! David

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As an old salt to this project, I would like to propose you hire a intern for communications here on the message boards. You guys could spend more time doing what you do best in the science world and any problems that are posted here could be brought to your attention by this intern. This intern could also post general news about the project as well as take care of other general communications tasks in the real offline world of publications and such.

we could have somebody else help check the boards, but I feel that communication with the people who make our research possible (ie, you) is my responsibility. David Kim is going to set things up so that my journal posts are echoed in the news section of the home page, so that people who only look there see more than outage reports, etc.

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we could have somebody else help check the boards, but I feel that communication with the people who make our research possible (ie, you) is my responsibility. David Kim is going to set things up so that my journal posts are echoed in the news section of the home page, so that people who only look there see more than outage reports, etc.

Yeah, that is a great idea. And was mentioned here and should have been done years ago. But better later then never!

And thank you for doing this great, Nature and Science publications are impressive. And things you guys working are real bleeding edge of science, some just feel like they came from sci-fi.

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TestPilot, AKA Administrator

Another good idea would be to update the publications page.
All the good publications of the last period are missing because the page is stuck at 2009.

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we could have somebody else help check the boards, but I feel that communication with the people who make our research possible (ie, you) is my responsibility. David Kim is going to set things up so that my journal posts are echoed in the news section of the home page, so that people who only look there see more than outage reports, etc.

Hi David

I think the quality of your comments are invaluable, but I think there are probably bits of information that anynoe in the loop could post, such as what different people or the lab as a whole are working on at the moment. My guess is that there are thousands of things that you could post on here that you wouldn't even consider worth posting because it's your every-day, but from the outside it's new info and that keeps people interested and makes us feel like we have a reciprocal connection with the project, and that our cpu time is being used by real people for real work. I think the majority of your posts get a fantastic reception, and the comments are often limited because people wouldn't have much that's constructive to add other than 'that sounds brilliant'! I've got a degree in Biology and don't understand half of the posts, but that's not a problem because we can research it ourselves if our interest takes us that way. The fact that the info is there and is reasonably regularly updated is the important thing to keep people here and keep them interested.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is I think you are striving for higher quality and quantity in your posts than the majortiy of people are after! I think something akin to tweets which are small but more regular (posted directly here or tweeted and then mirrored here) would be more than enough to keep people happy, with the occasional detail that you already post to bulk out the available info once in a while, along with (as Manuel says) updating the publications page.

HTH
Danny

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That all sounds good.
But the biggest complaint this time was that not a single person was watching the boards about the missing file that corrupted a whole series of tasks.
Dr. Baker, I know you can't keep up with your research and communications and also try to keep track of problems. So why don't you have your technology administrator or one of the researchers keep an eye on the number crunching board, so that if something goes wrong someone is alerted to it and can fix it or pull the batch of tasks affected so we don't have the latest problem again.

I do love to read your comments on here and miss them where there is nothing.
Looking forward to your next batch of research news.

Thanks for the feedback! I think you are right-I check the science pages, but not the number crunching pages, so I do miss the problem reporting. This would be a good job for a graduate student whose research project heavily relies on rosetta@home-I'll set this up soon. Also, we will update the publications page right away. Again, thanks for the comments, and advice on how we could do a better job is always appreciated!

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The list of articles and papers written by the Project Team has just been updated here.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Thank you. Really appreciate that. :)

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I took care of updating this page with some of the latest Rosetta publications.

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