University of Chicago researchers have created what they say is the first usable computer model of the entire virus that causes COVID-19, which could help better understand the disease and improve treatment.
“If you can understand how a virus works, that’s the first step toward stopping it,” chemistry professor Gregory Voth said in a statement. “Each thing you know about the virus’s life cycle and composition is a vulnerability point where you can hit it.”
So far, many researchers have focused on modeling individual proteins in the virus. “Viruses are more than just the sum of their parts,” said Voth, whose team created the model published in Biophysical Journal this week.
Although computers have gotten far more powerful over time, they still can’t routinely handle the massive amount of data involved in a virus and its interaction with the human body. To solve this problem, researchers at U of C focus on the most important characteristics of the virus.
“You could try running an atom-level model of the actual entire virus, but computationally, it would bog you down immediately,” said Voth, a computational scientist “You might be able to manage it long enough to model, say, a few hundred nanoseconds worth of movement, but that’s not really long enough to find out the most useful information.”
The U of C researchers drew on their experience modeling other viruses, such as HIV.
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January 09, 2021 at 05:14AM
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COVID-19 virus model from U of C researchers could help treat disease - Crain's Chicago Business
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