Specific research?? Connective Tissue Disorders?

[cameronjcw]

I was interested in participating and hoped to find something about Ehlers Danlos Syndrome which is a connective tissue disorder but couldnt find anything closer than osteogenisis imperfecta which is similar to some types of EDS.

Is there any way to join specific research or is it possible to request new research??

I have EDS and so does my daughter we both have type III although might have type IIII or some aspects of this. We both know many others with EDS and it badly needs research.

Can anybody help me. I used to be much better on the computer but these days get a lot of brain fog and concentration problems among others because of EDS so please be as basic as you can

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Jesse_V]

First off, welcome to the Folding@home support forum cameronjcw!

I've never heard of EDS, but after I looked it up I realized that it was related to defects in Type I and Type II collagen. As I see you are already aware, F@h has performed research into OI, which is also tied to Type I collagen. In 2005 the Pande lab released a publication which used quantum mechanical methods to improve computational studies of collagen, so AFAIK that's basically as far as the overlap goes. Even then, the OI studies stand as a pilot project compared to research into some of the other big diseases like Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and cancer.

At this time, there's not a whole lot of control over what work you help study. (There is some control, but it's not very reliable) But if you are a protein biochemist, contact the Pande lab and maybe they'll let you join or something. Then you can research all you want! But so far I haven't heard of any EDS research, but maybe that will start one day if there is enough interest for it. Personally I'd like them to focus on cancer, but everyone has a disease they'd personally like to see eradicated. I find their research impressive as it is already: many of the publications say something like "this is very important for disease research or for furthering our understanding, but there are some real difficulties with experimentally studying it, and previous simulation approaches have been severely limited by computational power. On our global network we've therefore simulated the entire thing, here it is."

I wish you the best of luck with EDS, and I'm sorry that you're having issues. Please let us know if you have any further questions and we'd be happy to help. You may even get an official response from the Pande Group, who knows!

[bruce]

Some diseases are known to be related to mis-folded proteins. Nearly a dozen years ago, FAH started studying protein mis-folding and it's still a primary area of study. The tools provided by FAH can study certain types of protein interactions that are not related to mis-folded proteins, but the likelihood of a new study depends more on solving problems that Stanford is good at rather than problems that might be more difficult to solve with the tools they have. Science doesn't start with a disease but rather with an underlying characteristic that can be studied effectively with the tools FAH provides.

Is EDS or other collagen defects related to mis-folded proteins? If so, there's a reasonably high probability of more studies. If not, is there an underlying problem that FAH can shed some light on?