The Human Microbiome and World Community Grid.
IBM's World Community Grid (WCG) is helping researchers from three leading scientific institutions who are collaborating to explore the proteins in the human microbiome.
Trillions of bacteria live inside as well as on our bodies. Much is still to be learned about their impact on our health.
It is strongly speculated that the microbiome contributes to our health as well as towards developing certain diseases from certain cancers to Parkinson's. However, this field has been largely unstudied.
For more about " The Hidden World of Microbiomes check out
WCG, and it's volunteers, have enabled researchers to use the distributed computing platform to accelerate this initial step of predicting protein structures of the human microbiome. The long term benefit of such research could lead to new and effective methods of tackling a variety of disease from Alzheimer's to various Cancers.
Dr. Tommi Vatanen, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, discussed the effect of Microbiome on our health here:
For more information about this project please read the following link
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/mip1/overview.do
To join WCG and use your computer to help with medical research please use the following link
https://join.worldcommunitygrid.org?recruiterId=715793
This will be my first post about the Microbiome as well as citizen science projects such as WCG where you can get involved with Science.
Cool! @lordvdr has been running WCG on our home computer for at least 10 years now, maybe more. I used to run it on several computers at work but when they locked security down, it got removed. I haven't checked them out in years.
It's a wonderful project. I just wish that universities would either partner with WCG or run the project. It's a shame that so few people partake in the project.
I'll try to write a bit more about WCG in the coming weeks... I'll also try to be less lazy :P but I cannot promise that :D
Cool! As @jamethiel said, I have had the WCG running at home for years. I think it is still running on a computer in my office as well but I haven't checked to see if it is still up and going.