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Showing posts from March, 2020

Help finding a cure for COVID19: Set up Folding@Home

COVID-19 has been already assigned as a pandemic worldwide now. It is now a global problem affecting all of our day to day lives. Almost all the methods of combating the virus at our disposal at this moment are essentially social distancing and maintaining hygiene until a cure is discovered. And while I write this post the death toll worldwide is 17,159 with 470,973 people infected. Be sure when you read this, these numbers have already swelled up. So while we wait and do our bit by maintaining social distance, I am here today to show you how we all can pitch in our compute power to help researchers find a cure for COVID19. Why Protein Folding? Why should you care? How a protein “looks” in 3D is essential for developing new drugs, especially for new viruses. COVID-19, for example, has really spikey proteins that jut out from its surface. Normally, human cells don’t care—they won’t let the virus inside. But COVID-19’s spikey proteins also harbor a Trojan Horse that “acti