Its often hard to know how to make a difference - but thanks to Rand at SEOmoz for highlighting a great cause, its now much easier with a piece of software that you add onto your comouter. Its called World Community Grid & I’ll let Rand explain the rest.

Their projects include:

• Helping to Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Investigating protein-protein interactions for 40,000 proteins whose structures are known, with particular focus on those proteins that play a role in neuromuscular diseases.
• Fiocruz Genome Comparison - Comparing genomic information to improve the quality and interpretation of biological data and our understanding of biological systems, host-pathogen and environmental interactions.
• Human Proteome Folding - obtain higher resolution structures for specific human proteins and pathogen proteins and further explore the limits of protein structure prediction.
• Fighting AIDS - using computation methods to identify candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease.

They also recently (in April of 2007) completed cancer research into Tissue Microarrays to determine how to improve the treatment of cancer with earlier and more targeted diagnostic tools.

To do your bit, just download the software here and spread the word to friends & colleagues.

I have to add that as with all software downloads, you should always check to make sure that it won’t have any negative effects on your computer. If someone like Rand Fishkin is recommending it, I can’t imagine any problems.

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