One of the great mystery of modern biology is how 【M1】______ proteins—the strings of amino acids that are the substance of all living things—fold into precise and complex shapes when they created inside living cells. 【M2】______ Proteins snap into their predestined shape within microseconds, but the multistep process by which they do so is so complicated that this would take a powerful computer【M3】______ centuries to come up a model for how it is done. 【M4】______ Recently, however, some very smart chemists at Stanford University and the University of Illinois borrowed an idea from the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project to find an alternate solution. 【M5】______ The SETl @ home project divvies out to 4 million PC owners chunks of raw data from the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Those PCs, in its idle moments, 【M6】______ filter this electronic noise for telltale signs of another civilization in the cosmos, and then ship the results back to SETI. Folding @ home, the brainchild of Stanford biophysics Professor Vijay Pende, similar parcels out the protein folding 【M7】______ computations among 43,000 active PC-owning volunteers. In Sunday's online version of the British journal Nature, Pende reported success. The 'distributed computing' system has modeled how a man-made chain of 23 amino acids called BBA5 snap into shape over the course of 6 【M8】______ microseconds matched the time it takes the protein to 【M9】______ form. and fold in the lab. The PC network already is at work deciphering the folding of real human proteins and may one day ravel 【M10】______ just what goes wrong in misshapen proteins believed responsible for afflictions such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Alzheimer's disease. 【M1】