Two less known DC-projects working on Sars-Cov2

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manalog
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Sep 17, 2015 3:08 pm

Two less known DC-projects working on Sars-Cov2

Post by manalog »

Hello,
I'd like to share also here a post I published on World Community Grid's forum, perhaps it can be useful also here:
Hi all,
I assume Scripps' researchers are aware of the existence of other distributed-computing projects participating in this fight against this invisible enemy: Rosetta@Home, Folding@Home, Ibercivis. I am aware that each one of those is doing research with a different approach, that everything helps, and I assume that the researchers behind OPN1 knows if they need some data from these projects and how to contact them. In science verification is important, but mere replication without communication is obviously a waste of precious resources.
I would like to show in brief two other projects that are working on Covid: they are less know, and perhaps OPN's researches does not know them. Perhaps they know them, in case ignore my post :)

The first is TN-Grid, from the University of Trento, Italy. They are running a project, gene@home, that is doing "gene network expansion" with an algorithm called PC-IM. They looks like a small but very serious project, with a good number of publication and very precise in the work they are doing. They did this "gene expansion" thing for many genes involved in some human pathologies but, during this outbreak, they expanded all the genes related to Sars-Cov2 according to recent papers, as can be seen in this forum post. Onestly, I do not know what a gene expansion is, but I am sure Scripps' researchers does. They completed this part of the research (1242 genes in 730296 WUs), and they are ok with sharing the data with the scientific community as soon as they need them. So, if this kind of research can be of any use for the purpose of OPN1, you should contact them!

The second is called Quarantine@Home and it is maintained by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, as can be seen in this reddit post. This project is really new and much less known than Tn-Grid. But I think it can be interesting for Scripps' researchers to see what they are doing because:
1) They are performing Autodock simulations between molecules from the ZINC database and three Sars-Cov2's targets: mpro-1, spike-1, spike-2;
2) Their software runs also on Nvidia GPU's on a docker, and I have seen that it runs very well, with a speed way faster than the one of OPN1 on CPU (of course);
3) Despite being very "spartan" their website is outstanding: results are updated real time and you can see all the binding energy calculated by users in a public database! So the data are immediately available to everyone, including your researchers of course. The best binding energy they've found so far is -14,8
Perhaps it could be very useful for you to compare their results with yours.

Let me know if this post was useful even if just a tiny bit in this fight.
Thank you for your job!
This is the link to the original post: https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/foru ... read,42403

Let me know if it can be useful here :)
Cheers, good job!
NRT_AntiKytherA
Posts: 111
Joined: Sun May 10, 2020 11:50 pm

Re: Two less known DC-projects working on Sars-Cov2

Post by NRT_AntiKytherA »

Well it was interesting reading at any rate.
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