Dear Proteins@Home participants,

I wish you a happy and successful New Year!

In the period before the summer, more than 15,000
volunteers participated in the Proteins@Home project.
I would like to thank all of you for your overwhelming
support. My warm thanks also go to the BOINC development
and testing community.

Thanks to you, we were able to make significant scientific
contributions to the protein folding problem and to protein
structure prediction methods. Our first publications are
just becoming available: see, eg,
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/117860966/ABSTRACT
A book on distributed computing will also appear in 2008,
with a chapter describing Proteins@Home:
Distributed & Grid Computing -- Science Made Transparent
for Everyone. Principles, Applications and Supporting
Communities, Tektum Publishers, Berlin.

In the last few months, thanks to the Proteins@Home
results, we have considerably improved our prediction
method and are beginning to apply it to specific protein
families such as the Src homology domains and so-called
WW domains. This will help us identify new members of
these families and understand the function of newly-
discovered genes. More information is in the attached
report.

With our improved methodology in place, we are ready
for a new computation phase. We hope that you will
participate in this new phase.

Best wishes,

Thomas Simonson
head of the Proteins@Home project

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