Your Computer Can Help Scientists Find A Cure To The Coronavirus

Back in the day, your computer used to be just your computer. However, with our computers becoming increasingly connected to the internet, your computer isn’t just yours anymore. In fact, if you’re not opposed to it, it seems that you can actually “donate” some of your computer’s processing resources to scientists who are working on a cure to the coronavirus.

This in concept works similarly to how cryptocurrency is mined. This effort was made possible in a new collaboration between the Folding@home Consortium and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. By downloading a free client to your computer, it will connect it to a massive distributed computational network where scientists will use the additional processing resources to study and formulate a cure to the virus.

Right now, scientists are trying to find a cure by figuring out how the virus attaches itself to the lungs of humans. They know that it uses a spike in protein, but how this spike works has left researchers clueless.

According to Folding@home’s Ariana Brenner Clerkin, “Proteins are not stagnant — they wiggle and fold and unfold to take on numerous shapes. We need to study not only one shape of the viral spike protein, but all the ways the protein wiggles and folds into alternative shapes in order to best understand how it interacts with the [lung], so that an antibody can be designed.”

If you are interested in helping out, then head on over to Folding@home’s website to download the client.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers, Medical
Tags: Coronavirus, covid-19, Health, Science