3 ms·
Much of the action inside cells is done via proteins. It's taken a huge amount of distributed computing power just to figure out a reasonable hypothesis for how
by SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
Much of the action inside cells is done via proteins. It's taken a huge amount of distributed computing power just to figure out a reasonable hypothesis for how they fold (only one part of the movement) and €1.22 billion to build the XFEL and have a way to image them on the required timescales: 1-2 femtoseconds. 0.000000000000001 seconds. 0.01 seconds is an eternity, calculating that long would take an utterly enormous amount of computer time.
- Retric 9y agoYou can spend similar amounts of processing power (or vastly more) modeling a single atom over much shorter time scales from quantum mechanics. Protean folding while important results on fairly stable configurations and you don't need the same granularity after that point. PS: Also of note protean folding simulations don't even simulate the water surrounding the protean and are again very simplified.