More on protein modeling against SARS-CoV-2

May 5, 2020

John Timmer at ArsTechnica.com outlines the research behind how Remdesivir might work against SARS-CoV-2 and points out a topic I wrote about few weeks ago:

A few decades ago, figuring out atomic-level details of proteins would have required many months of laboriously trying to get the drug and protein to form neat, orderly crystals. But we've since developed a combination of hardware and algorithms that now allow us to take what are essentially electron microscope images of individual proteins and combine them with enough precision to figure out where all the atoms are.

Distributed computing projects like Rosetta@home are showing their role in fighting this current pandemic and are something more each of us could do to help.
To me, it's fascinating how, in few decades, research has gone from lengthy protein crystals growth for X-Ray Diffraction analysis to days of molecules being modeled by computational chemistry.

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