Simulación de la proteína SPIKE COVID19 en laboratorios de informática educativa

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Proteins are one of the organic molecules that have vital functions in the maintenance of cell life and reproduction, their manufacture is a complex process governed by a sequence of folding still unknown. In the context of Covid19, the Folding@home initiative carried out a distributed computing project that allows the simulation of the folding process of the Spike protein of Covid19, whose function is to couple to the ACE2 receptor of animal cells and thus penetrate the cell and use its machinery to reproduce. OBJECTIVE: To prove that the idle computational time available in educational computer labs can be used to simulate protein folding. METHOD: This is descriptive research where client software is installed on low-end computers that continuously send protein folding work units to a central server. RESULTS: After 90 days of work, a cluster of 27 PCs completed 1993 units of simulation of the Spike protein. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: Although the piloting was successful, the client software must be optimized to take full advantage of the different processors and operating systems with which the distributed computing software provided by Folding@home is compatible.