Helping create the medicines of the future

Welcome to Docking@Home

Docking@Home is a project which uses Internet-connected computers to perform scientific calculations that aid in the creation of new and improved medicines. The project aims to help cure diseases such as Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Docking@Home is a collaboration between the University of Delaware, The Scripps Research Institute, and the University of California - Berkeley. It is part of the Dynamically Adaptive Protein-Ligand Docking System project and is supported by the National Science Foundation.

How Does It Work?

Before new drugs can be produced for laboratory testing, researchers must create molecular models and simulate their interactions to reveal possible candidates for effective drugs. This simulation is called docking. The combinations of molecules and their binding orientations are infinite in number. Simulating as many combinations as possible requires a tremendous amount of computing power. In order to reduce costs, researchers have decided that an effective means of generating this computing power is to distribute the tasks across a large number of computers.

How Can I Help?

By downloading a free program developed at University of California - Berkeley called BOINC, you can contribute your computer's idle processing cycles to the Docking@Home project. It's safe, easy to setup, and runs only when you want it to so it won't affect your ability to use your computer. If you are interested in finding out more information, you can read more about the project and the science behind it, or if you are ready to help, you can get started below.



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News

D@H starts crossdocking
February 2, 2010 16:18 EST

This week Docking@Home starts its crossdocking phase, we will perform docking of a given ligand with slightly different conformations of the receptor, then our postprocessing algorithm will select the best ligand conformation. This process simulates the flexibility of the protein resulting in more realistic simulations

February 1, 2010 19:05 EST

Tomorrow D@H will start crossdocking, it is a critical change but we expect we will move smoothly. Please be patient in the event of possible crashes

Happy New Year
January 1, 2010 11:45 EST

This year has been exciting, we are in the last phase of testing our docking algorithms, we have now complete results for HIV1 and Trypsin, we are running p38alpha and after that we will start a crossdocking phase. Thank you to all our volunteers and happy New Year

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[BAT] Jack Raby

I'm member of Boinc.be, the biggest Belgian team. I live in Namur, a small town in the southern part of Belgium. I'm crunching since 1999.

 

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