Covid-19India.org Folding@Home team

We have been getting a lot of requests from people who want to volunteer in the effort against COVID-19. Keeping in mind the fact that most of us are not in the field of medical research, we gave it a lot of thought and decided to start a Folding@Home team so that everyone of us, including those with a non-technical background, can contribute to the fight.

Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics. (from https://foldingathome.org/about/)

To develop therapeutic antibodies or small molecules for 2019-nCoV, scientists need to better understand the structure of the viral spike protein and how it binds to the human ACE2 receptor required for viral entry into human cells.

Proteins fold and unfold to take on numerous shapes. We need to study not only one shape of the viral spike protein, but all the ways the protein changes shape and folds into alternative shapes in order to best understand how it interacts with the ACE2 receptor, so that an antibody can be designed. Some preliminary work has been done on this front, but a lot more needs to be done! We can build computational models that accomplish this goal, but it takes a lot of computing power.   

This is where you come in! With many computers working towards the same goal, we aim to help develop a therapeutic remedy as quickly as possible. You can download Folding@home here [LINK]. Just install the app on your device, select to to contribute to "Any Disease", and join the COVID-19 India.org team using our team number 253290.

We are setting up a telegram group exclusively for anyone interested in contributing to the Folding@Home effort. This is the invite link: https://t.me/joinchat/BR6BnE7qzcbwb9odYG2oVg

It is not a general discussion group, so please join us there only if you are seriously interested in contributing.