Computer Simulation against COVID-19

The Israeli team (Technion, Weizmann, Tel Aviv University) of the ATLAS experiment at CERN has devoted 10% of its huge computing processing power for  helping medical researchers fight COVID-19. In normal times the Israeli GRID cluster serves the ATLAS experiment in analyzing LHC data and simulate billions of proton proton collision events. Nowadays part of the GRID cluster was turned to run Folding@Home (a program that focuses on disease research – specifically how proteins fold) to simulate how proteins from SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) work and how they interact with human cells.

While proteins experimental studies are complicated, the goal here is to simulate the protein in action. The structures studied with simulation, which may be difficult to get experimentally, may serve as a key for discovering a new therapeutic.