Decoding corona's protein structure

Guessing the movements of the various amino acids and their interactions could enable the creation of drugs that combat the virus

One of the unforeseen side effects of the coronavirus has been the development of what could be described as an “uber-super-computer” through a mode of crowd-sourcing. The Vijay Pande Lab at Stanford University has been running a distributed computing project for many years.

This project, Folding@home, asks for volunteers to donate spare time on their computers. These resources are used to investigate the combinatorially complex mechanics of the ways in which various proteins can be folded and how those proteins work. Protein chains acquire their 3-dimensional structure through folding and this affects their functionalities.

Misfoldings can be the cause of