Folding@Home - Coronavirus

Description

Folding@home is joining researchers around the world working to better understand the 2019 Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) to accelerate the open science effort to develop new life-saving therapies. By downloading Folding@Home, you can donate your unused computational resources to the Folding@home Consortium, where researchers working to advance our understanding of the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV that could aid in the design of new therapies. The data you help us generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing lifesaving drugs. With many computers working towards the same goal, we aim to help develop a therapeutic remedy as quickly as possible. By downloading Folding@home here [https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/] and selecting to contribute to “Any Disease”, you can help provide us with the computational power required to tackle this problem. One protein from 2019-nCoV, a protease encoded by the viral RNA, has already been crystallized. Although the 2019-nCoV spike protein of interest has not yet been resolved bound to ACE2, our objective is to use the homologous structure of the SARS-CoV spike protein to identify therapeutic antibody targets. Like other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is an online citizen science project. In these projects non-specialists contribute computer processing power or help to analyse data produced by professional scientists. Participants in these projects play an invaluable role in facilitating research for little or no obvious reward. Research has been carried out into the motivations of citizen scientists and most of these studies have found that participants are motivated to take part because of altruistic reasons, that is, they want to help scientists and make a contribution to the advancement of their research. Many participants in citizen science have an underlying interest in the topic of the research and gravitate towards projects that are in disciplines of interest to them. Folding@home is no different in that respect. Research carried out recently on over 400 active participants revealed that they wanted to help make a contribution to research and that many had friends or relatives affected by the diseases that the Folding@home scientists investigate.

Aim

Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for performing molecular dynamics simulations of protein dynamics. Its initial focus was on protein folding but has shifted to more biomedical problems, such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, COVID-19, and Ebola. The project uses the idle processing resources of personal computers owned by volunteers who have installed the software on their systems. Folding@home is currently based at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine The Folding@home software runs while you do other things. While you keep going with your everyday activities, your computer will be working to help us find cures for diseases like cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza and many others.

How to participate

Equipment

Windows, MacOS or Linux on a computer or laptop