As you may have noticed, we received a couple more targets to run for the Smash Childhood Cancer project.

One is beta-catenin which is implicated in several cancers including craniopharyngioma (pituitary gland tumor), a subset of medulloblastoma (tumor at thebase of the brain), hepatoblastoma (liver cancer), and subsets of some adult cancers including liver and colon cancers.

Another target Lib28B is implicated in many pediatric cancers such as neuroblastoma, Wilm's tumor (kidney), hepatoblastoma (liver), and others.

With the power of the grid we will go through these target relatively quickly. However, the researchers are working on identifying more targets. Part of the delay is in determining the atomic structure of a target molecule. This can be a difficult process that can sometimes take years. Computational structure prediction methods are used for smaller molecules. For larger molecules, x-ray crystallography must be used. But for that to work, they first need to make crystals of the target molecule. It is easy to grow salt crystals in a brine solution as you may have done in science class. But crystallizing proteins and other large molecules can be quite challenging. They try mixing in other chemicals which may coax the molecules into crystals. This is a difficult, mostly trial-and-error task. Complicating things further is the problem that some molecules can flex which makes this all the more difficult. Once they have a crystal of the target molecule, they shine monochromatic x-ray light through it and the atoms diffract the x-rays leaving a unique pattern on the film. If you squint at a yellow sodium street light at a distance at night, you might see diffraction patterns around the light because the edge of your eyelid and eyelashes diffract the light. The same happens with x-rays. X-rays have much shorter wave lengths than visible light, so they are useful in finding the positions of things as small as atoms. Computational techniques are used to figure out where the atoms must have been located to create the given diffraction pattern. This method was used over 60 years ago to finally determine that DNA was a double helix. But back then they didn't have powerful computers to help decipher the x-ray pattern.