Folding Forum

Looking through past Folding@home projects and papers, I haven't been able to find much on SARS or other Corona viruses ... Although this may be asking a lot - I think to attract new participants in the network, FAH has to become more timely. When I've told people about FAH, their immediate question have been "what are you doing about Ebola?" Zika? West Nile?" Usually their questions relate directly to what's in the news. Would it be possible to create rapid project deployments where the entire consortium could get ahead of the latest issues instead of waiting for six months or a year before building simulations that other labs have already been studying. In this case, even if the study is under a generic corona virus like the common cold - it primes the pump for new participants. #Marketing albeit under some somber pressure.

Don't they have to get a description of the virus first?

Fast response is great, but they are not in the drug development business. They find interesting weak spots to attack (for example), but I think are not in a position to carry it much beyond that.
However, if paired with their friends at Rosetta, they might be able to come up with something a little beyond that.

FAH still could run basic research projects somehow related to these viruses which show up every year in asia and africa.

These viruses are fascinating. We've recently started working on Ebola and have our first publication on the topic in the works. We also just published our first paper on the SFTS virus.

I remember a big outcry a few years ago by folders that some of the biggest FAH projects (at the time) were about the flu. Several people even left the project.
FAH collaborated with the Kasson Lab to better understand membrane fusion in the hope of one day designing antiviral drugs. Now look how important this research can be. Do FAH and Kasson still work together?

IMHO, FAH's viral work and antibiotic resistance research are the most important by far. Cancer treatments steadily improve over time whereas we still have nothing to fight a virus and antibiotics are getting less and less efficacious.

Thanks! I agree these are important problems. The lack of new antibiotics is particularly troublesome given expanding antibiotic resistance. The Kasson lab stopped participating in FAH some time ago, but my lab has a couple of virus projects going.

Thank you for taking some of your precious time to reply. Keep up the good work!

Thanks! And thanks all for helping advance science by participating in FAH!

This discussion leads me to a followon question. The last notable collaborations between China and the folding@home consortium were the Bryostatin studies resulting in some interesting papers. Has the trade war impacted data sharing, and student exchange between the consortium and HKUST who are likely to be on the front line of Corona virus research? Thank you.

HKUST had persistent networking issues in the past (the great firewall of China?). They've expressed interest in getting involved again, so we'll see what happens.

You can run FAH on the GPU and world community grid on your CPU at the same time - they have projects for TB and AIDS currently (used to have Zika and Ebola but looks like those projects finished)

A Corona specific research project is in the development stages but isn't ready for distribution. In the past, FAH did research into the SARS virus and it looks like that research can be adapted to be specific for the Corona virus. There's no easy way to predict when (or even if) such a project will be ready for distribution.

Jayfreck wrote:You can run FAH on the GPU and world community grid on your CPU at the same time

I run all of my machines with both BOINC for CPU work and Folding for the GPU work. Normally, the BOINC work covers a wide range, certainly including WCG.

At the moment, all 11 of my machines (10 Ubuntu and one Win7) are on Rosetta.
They seem to have the best (and only) handle on the Corona virus.
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum ... p?id=13533

See the latest FAH blog post : https://foldingathome.org/2020/02/27/fo ... 2019-ncov/

Corona virus is coming to FAH !

Great news! Is there any way we can directly fold the Corona projects? Normally I'm all for general science, but this seems like an exception.