Oak Ridge University in America is having some serious stuff cooking in their laboratory these days. In this time of the pandemic, the supercomputers there are working towards the eradication of the Novel Coronavirus through methods suggested by computational calculations
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is finding all sorts of possible combinations of chemicals available to find the perfect drug for terminating the virus, as well as modelling how these chemical drugs would react with the virus by incorporating and visualizing its internal shape and structure.
Jeremy Smith the director of Biophysics at Oak Ridge states that “We could get these calculations done in one day on the supercomputer whereas for a normal computer, it would take a month”.
The good news is that available combinations suggested to deform the spike protein, which is the essential protein of the virus is accessible right now. But these should be verified using the opinions of Biologists as well as real-time human trials using the produced drug.
Colleen Jonsson at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis had developed a high– throughput screen-short for a screening test, to test multiple samples simultaneously.
Here’s how the screen works:
She puts cells in containers with tiny wells in them, then adds the candidate drug, and then adds the coronavirus waiting for two-three days to incubate it and then examines whether the cells have been protected from the virus by the drug. If the relative cells are not affected then the efficiency of the drug needs to be analyzed in detail.
The best thing is that this university is not alone in this race rather many universities are working towards this goal as well as the whole scientific community is providing support for the innovations.
According to US President Trump, the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium is unifying the federal, industrial and academic laboratories together.
– Krupa V Mathew
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