New here donor here.

[Tsotsor]

Hello FAH community.
Im so new to all these so sorry if Im violating any of the forum rules.
All I wanted is to ask some questions because I dont really get what is going on.
My apologies once again.

[Joe_H]

This is the place to ask questions about folding if you are not certain where to ask them. Some basic guidelines are posted at the top of this area, a post on forum policies is here - viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15.

[PantherX]

Welcome to the F@H Forum Tsotsor,

Please note that this Forum is specially created so that New Donors can ask any F@H related questions without worrying about the correct Forum. As long as our Forum Policies are followed, we don't have any objection at all. Furthermore, if you do happen to accidentally post something that might be in violation of our Forum policies, we will inform you via a PM (Personal Message) and the post will be moderated.

Please remember that your passkey shouldn't be posted in the public. If you have the need to find out about the completion percentage for the Quick Return Bonus (QRB), then please PM an Administrator/Moderator with your username and passkey who will attempt to assist you.

[Jesse_V]

There's a lot of knowledgeable and experienced people here who should be able to answer whatever F@h questions you have. We'd be happy to explain things. If you think your question has been asked before, you could try a forum search or try on Google. Other than that, fire away.

[Tsotsor]

Sorry for being so late. I would love a clear explanation how do I actually contribute? I mean I love helping and I'm turning the program on when I can but I haven't actually understand what am I doing.

[PantherX]

Please note that this video can give you a general overview of how you can contribute to F@H (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sJx9z1uB9k).

Basically, F@H studies protein folding. When a protein folds correctly, everything is fine. When a protein mis-folds, bad things start to happen. To understand how a protein folds/mis-folds, the researchers choose a particular protein and generate a Project. That project is divided into several WUs (Work Units) which are assigned to compatible donor systems. These WUs are small slices of time and can take minutes to days to fold on a system, depending on the hardware and the type of WU being folded. Once your system finishes the WU, it upload it to the servers and you are assigned another one. The WUs here on F@H are serial in nature, i.e. you need to finish Project: 8900 (Run 1, Clone 1, Gen 0) for Project: 8900 (Run 1, Clone 1, Gen 1) to be generated. However, within a single Project, there can also be parallel in nature too, i.e. you can have Project: 8900 (Run 1, Clone 1, Gen 0), Project: 8900 (Run 1, Clone 2, Gen 0), Project: 8900 (Run 1, Clone 3, Gen 0) ready to assigned to donor systems.

[ChristianVirtual]

And in case you want to know what protein are and some very, very, very basics in chemistry I run once into this video: http://youtu.be/2Jgb_DpaQhM It gives a bit of context.