I'm at the annual rosetta developers conference which started yesterday and goes through saturday. There are 90 developers from all over the world attending, and there has been a very exciting mix of new algorithmic developments and exciting applications to important biological and medical problems.

In a few weeks I will be describing our work on vaccine design at the upcoming HIV vaccine meeting in Seattle: http://www.hivvaccineenterprise.org/con ... ogram.html, maybe some of you will be there!

The results of the last few days of computations of Rosetta@home on your computers have been pretty amazing! In collaboration with a group at the NIH, we experimented with adding a very small amount of information about protein structures from nuclear magnetic resonance experiments to the rosetta structure prediction process. this information is fairly easily obtainable, and doesn't seem like it would have much effect, but the results show quite contrary--the models produced are extremely accurate! this has the potential to revolutionize how scientists determine protein 3D structures using NMR data. We would never have been able to test the idea, which came up in a phone conversation several months ago, without all of your contributions.

Today I spoke at the AidsVaccine07 meeting about our work on designing vaccines. Scientists who have been working on this very challenging problem for many years are I think excited about our approach as it is something that hasn't been tried before and makes sense conceptually. While we are still far from a vaccine, our initial results with collaborators at the NIH are promising. I spoke to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal after my talk, and I think she is interested in writing an article on rosetta@home and HIV vaccine design.

Now for the good news!

As many of you will remember, you started seeing RNA molecules folding on your screensavers in addition to proteins about 9 months ago. Rhiju had generalized the Rosetta folding methodology beyond proteins to RNA which also adopts folded functional structures in addition to being a critical component in the reading of the genetic code inscribed in DNA. Using your computers, he tested his new RNA folding protocol, and the exciting results he obtained he reported in a paper that was submitted to the proceedings of the national academy of sciences (PNAS) several months ago. The paper was accepted with rave reviews, and has just appeared in print.

It is the policy of the PNAS journal to highlight for each issue the papers of exceptional interest. Your work, as reported in Rhiju's paper, is the major highlight of the issue of PNAS that just appeared! You can read about this months highlights in PNAS at

http://www.pnas.org/misc/highlights.shtml

In this paper, as in all of our papers (quite a few by now!) that have relied absolutely on your contributions, we have thanked all rosetta@home participants and cited by name those contributors who found the lowest energy structures. You can see the list at

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/data/0703836104/DC1/7


Thank you for your contributions, and we look forward to many more important scientific advances with your help at rosetta@home in the next year!