Appears that Rosetta@home is also working on coronavirus proteins.[1] “Folding@home’s strength is modeling the process of protein folding, while Rosetta@home’s strength is computing protein design and predicting protein structure and docking.”

I’m curious as to how much these distributed computing projects actually accomplish.

[1] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13533

Meanwhile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22479178 SETI@home shuts down after 21 years

In an announcement posted yesterday, the project stated that they will no longer send data to SETI@home clients starting on March 31st, 2020 as they have reached a “point of diminishing returns” and have analyzed all the data that they need for now.

Wait, this is great and all, but they’re saying (emphasis mine):

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 ACE2 receptor, so that an antibody can be designed. Low-resolution structures of the SARS-CoV spike protein exist and we know the mutations that differ between SARS-CoV and 2019-nCoV. Given this information, we are uniquely positioned to help model the structure of the 2019-nCoV spike protein and identify sites that can be targeted by a therapeutic antibody. We can build computational models that accomplish this goal, but it takes a lot of computing power.

Aren’t there institutions…or states…. that might have more computing power at hand than Folding@home has?

I’m perhaps too naive here, and certainly glad to help such a great project, but it does beg the question.