Can your computer help stop COVID-19 and other viral pandemics? Crowdsourced simulation tools can help us understand how viral proteins work and therefore speed up potential vaccines and therapies. Here's how you can get involved directly using programs like Rosetta!

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To download Rosetta and let your computer help in simulating go to:
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/


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Viruses use proteins in various ways to infect and hack ourselves to reproduce themselves this is very much what Tsarskoe b2 is doing right now these are highly complex structures and they are too small for us to observe them in action but can we use computers to simulate their interactions in order to help speed up the search for vaccines or other drug therapies wait hold up what exactly our virus is a virus is an entity that infects the living cells of an organism and can only replicate inside of them cells viruses can infect all life-forms including animals plants and microorganisms such as bacteria they are found wherever there is life and have probably existed since living cells first evolved so they've been around a long time they have been an important means of gene transfer in evolution thereby increasing genetic diversity about 5,000 virus species are known out of the millions of types that exist they are the most numerous and diverse type of biological entity on earth and are found in almost every known ecosystem there's an ongoing debate as to whether they are truly alive or not some biologists think they were alive because they carried genetic material evolved through natural selection and reproduce on the other hand they lack key characteristics of life such as cellular structure and the ability to replicate on their own some deem them to be organisms at the edge of life the host range is the variety of host cells that a particular virus can infect this ranges from narrow to broad as some viruses can't infect certain species while some can infect many okay so what about proteins are they part of virus a viral protein is actually both a component and a product of a virus viral proteins come in several flavors including structural non structural regulatory and accessory medical science usually looks at the structural type most viral structural proteins are parts that make up the capsule and envelope of the virus the viral DNA or RNA encodes the instructions needed to replicate the virus the capsid acts like a shield that protects those instructions it is also the part that attaches a very on a virus outside a host to a cell and allows it to penetrate the cellular membrane viruses basically break into a cell and use its machinery to make its own proteins how rude and sneaky so the viral proteins are really the key to us understanding more about viruses and how to diffuse them the function of a protein is determined by its shape a three-dimensional structure formed through a complex process called protein folding where it essentially builds itself since they are too small to be seen in action one promising way for us to understand complex proteins in various states with other molecules is through computer simulations but wait there's another problem these simulations can be so complex that the computing power required is enormous and even beyond that of supercomputers enter Rosetta at home Rosetta at home is a distributed computer network that uses the power of many computers around the world an individual computer runs a part of the simulation while it's idle and then sends the data back you can just chill while your computer is doing the work with a recent covert 19 outbreak and crisis rosetta at home has been used to predict the structure of proteins central to this virus as well as to test new mini proteins to be used as potential therapeutics and diagnostics rosetta was recently used to predict the structure of a coronavirus protein before to be measured in a lab by offering scientists a glimpse of the spiked protein of Tsarskoe v2 rosetta provided a boost to efforts to develop drugs and vaccines against the virus this protein is how the virus fuses its membranes with our cellular membranes in order to infect ourselves Rosetta calculated the 3d structure of the spike ...

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#covid19 #pandemic #proteinfolding #biology #rosetta #distributedcomputing #simulations #ststw