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Computer-game console contributes to science

PlayStation-3 owners chip in to help research projects.

Computer-game consoles most commonly associated with killing aliens may soon be used to actually search for them. At the same time, they could also help to cure Alzheimer's disease, carry out climate predictions and malaria epidemiology, and study gravity waves.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on March 30, 2007 06:08 PM |

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I found this article on possible drug design at home very interesting and I appreciate this new possible application of PlayStation 3. For those readers who don’t know me, I am a virologist working in the field of discovery/development of antiviral strategies. Like many other scientists, I have had to face the major funding shortage that occurred some years ago in Italy. I could not afford platforms for sophisticated molecular modeling such as Sybyl (extremely useful, but also extremely expensive!) in order to save money to buy the reagents. I then tried my best to assemble free software and affordable programs in order to study the docking of antiretroviral drugs to their enzyme targets. In the article linked below, the readers may find an example on how unexpensive tools running on a Pentium II PC can produce biologically sound results, in agreement with robust biochemical data published in the literature:
http://www.retrovirology.com/content/4/1/21
The availability of PS3 (whose price is accessible to families) may overcome the limits of the surrogate tools for molecular modelling, adopted by me and many other scientists, and may improve “drug design at home”.
Andrea Savarino, M.D.
Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-mediated Diseases Istituto Superiore di Sanità Viale Regina Elena, 299 00161- Rome Italy.
Phone: +39 06 49902305
FAX: +39 063054519
E-mails: asavarino@medscape.com
andrea.savarino@iss.it

Posted by: Andrea Savarino | March 30, 2007 09:14 PM

It is very encouraging. The computing capacity is always a big problem to the theoreitcal study of the biochemistry, though it has been developed greatly in the last 10 years. A lot of work can be done with higher computing performance. However, it should be noted that the ideal from man(woman) is the most important. We cannot dependent only on the high performance of the "computer"

Posted by: Qing Shao | April 1, 2007 04:13 AM

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