Personal computer owners now have front-row tickets to the mapping of the human genome and can offer effortless research assistance to Stanford University scientists.

Genome@home, at Stanford University, is one of a dozen programs now available nationwide that can be downloaded onto home computers anywhere and used to aid scientific research.

Computer owners don’t have to do anything besides download the program to aid in research, because the program runs by itself, much like a screensaver.

Once running, the program sends the processed information back to the Stanford server and retrieves more unfinished data.

If enough computers are used correctly and the goals of the program are met, results collected from computers across the country will allow new proteins to be engineered for medical therapy. New pharmaceuticals may result from the research and scientists will gain insight into the evolution of genes.

Genome@home was started at Stanford University and is led by Stefan Larson, who explained the program working by making a virtual protein that is found in the millions of cells in every human being.

One major success of the genome@home project has been that it can estimate the time it takes for a unique protein to collapse into a generic blob.

“We’ve been able to run these simulations of proteins collapsing virtually and get the same results as experimental researchers have been able to get through empirical testing,” Larson said. “Most results are fairly technical, but this is a major success.”

Larson said there are about 100,000 personal computers working on the genome@home project right now, and that number is growing.

“This program has been expanding more than two years,” Larson said. “It doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. We’re excited about success, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes right now.”

Larson also added that there is going to be more to come in the next year or so.

“I personally don’t use many computers for genomes,” said Waclaw Szybalski, University of Wisconsin professor of medical science. “But there are many areas in Madison that do, and making this research public will help.”

Among some of the other distributed computing projects, there is a folding@home project also done by the Pande Group, and SETI@home — a program headquartered at Berkley University that allows your computer to join the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.