Rosetta (bioinformatics)

Rosetta is a software package for protein structure prediction. Originally introduced by the Baker laboratory at the University of Washington in 1998 as an ab initio approach to structure prediction, Rosetta has since branched into several development streams and distinct services, providing features such as macromolecular docking and protein design. Many of the graduate students and other researchers involved in Rosetta's initial development have since moved to other universities and research institutions, and subsequently enhanced different parts of the Rosetta project. The Rosetta platform derives its name from the Rosetta Stone, as it attempts to decipher the structural "meaning" of proteins' amino acid sequences. Development of the Rosetta code is done by Rosetta Commons. The software is freely licensed to the academic community and available to pharmaceutical companies for a fee. Rosetta participates in CASP and CAPRI. Rosetta@home is a volunteer computing project that runs Rosetta software on volunteer computers. Rosetta@home contributes to the prediction of protein structure as well as to the development of Rosetta itself. It was released (i.e., announced as no longer beta) on October 6, 2005. Rosetta@home is a volunteer computing project researching protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, run by the Baker lab. Rosetta@home aims to predict protein–protein docking and design new proteins with the help of about fifty-five thousand active volunteered computers processing at over 487,946 GigaFLOPS on average as of September 19, 2020. Foldit, a Rosetta@home videogame, aims to reach these goals with a crowdsourcing approach. Though much of the project is oriented toward basic research to improve the accuracy and robustness of proteomics methods, Rosetta@home also does applied research on malaria, Alzheimer's disease, and other pathologies. Like all BOINC projects, Rosetta@home uses idle computer processing resources from volunteers' computers to perform calculations on individual workunits.