News & Topics

The Department of Biological Science and Technology (Yamato Laboratory), Faculty of Industrial Science and Technology, and the Department of Information Science (Takeda Laboratory), Faculty of Science and Technology, at the Tokyo University of Science, have launched a joint project known as Project "TANPAKU", a general-participation type research project for the purpose of predicting the spatial structure of protein that can be expected to contribute greatly to the medical field.

This project is an attempt to elucidate the spatial structure of protein, which has a tremendous effect on all life activities and determines the properties of the proteins that are the cause of various diseases through the shared use of general household PCs. Due to the massive computing capabilities that it requires, prediction of the spatial structure of protein has remained unresolved issue in science over the past fifty years since the structure of protein was clarified experimentally.

This project utilizes distributed computing in a parallel computation system requiring the cooperation of numerous households as science volunteers and assigns computation operations to each of the households via the Internet. Distributed computing, which makes it possible to challenge difficult issues through the cooperation of the general public and the computers that they own, is becoming a mounting focus of attention as a new form of scientific promotion and social contribution. Seeking the participation of as many computers as possible with target collaboration set at one million both in Japan and abroad, efforts will be made to predict the spatial structure of various types of protein with the aim of achieving future contributions in various fields centered in medical treatment.

Persons who would to take part in the Project "TANPAKU" are requested to access the URL below and download the program in line with the instructions given on the website.