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Because of limited computational power and memory footprint of  [Android](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)) devices, people ask me regularly whether it is worthwhile performing scientific calculations on these devices. I normally would answer with "yes of course" without any real examples but today I read an interesting article on the [Rosetta@home](http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta) forum ([here](https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=12357)) where specifically these devices were used,  resulting in a paper published in [Science](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6369/1461/).

Rosetta@home performs research to determine the 3-dimensional shapes of [proteins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein). This could ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases like [HIV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein), [Malaria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria), [Cancer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer) and [Alzheimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease). It has more than 31,000 active members and is using the [BOINC platform](https://boinc.berkeley.edu/) to exchange work-units and results with Internet connected computers.  Rosetta@home is also a whitelisted Gridcoin project. The [Gridcoin](https://www.gridcoin.us/) network rewards BOINC users in paying them for their computing efforts, which helps to offset costs like electricity bills. [Team Gridcoin](https://boincstats.com/en/stats/14/team/detail/12575) has 738 active members on this project and generates 12% of the total (RAC) output. (source: (1), (2), (3) & (5))

In the paper released on 15/Dec/2017 in [Sience](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6369/1461/), the authors described the computational strategies for designing [peptides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide) that adopt diverse shapes with very high accuracy and for providing comprehensive coverage of the structures that can be formed by short peptides. This new method allows designing additional custom peptides with arbitrary and diverse shapes, which can help increasing resistance to natural [enzymes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzyme) that breakdown these peptides. (source: (4) & (5))

<center>![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmUkcXSGDHkPP1ZBynu1Pr1SiPDAq3UQTMohbwZcjsoRuV/image.png)<h6>A conceptual illustration of sampling many peptide
structures and selecting the best through their 
energy landscapes (Credit Ahmad Hosseinzadeh
and Khosro Khosravi)</h6></center>

As part of the same paper, the researchers highlighted that designing peptides take intensive computer power, resulting in expensive calculations and Rosetta@home reduces these costs. All volunteers were credited for donating their spare CPU cycles to the project, which directly contributed to the success of the paper. (source: (4) & (6))

This is exciting news and it shows that mobile devices can be used beneficially for scientific calculations, advancing research and science. So if you have an Andrioid device, Rosetta@home is one of the projects to consider.

**Resources:**
(1) [Gridcoin](https://www.gridcoin.us/)
(2) [Rosetta@home](http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta)
(3) [BoincStats](https://boincstats.com)
(4) [UW Medicine](https://newsroom.uw.edu/news/computational-strategies-overcome-obstacles-peptide-therapeutics-development)
(5) [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org)
(6) [Paper in Science](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6369/1461/)

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Thanks for reading. Follow me for more BOINC & Gridcoin related articles.
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