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Volunteer Computing Project SiDock@home for Virtual Drug Screening Against SARS-CoV-2

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Computer Science Protecting Human Society Against Epidemics (ANTICOVID 2021)

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a volunteer computing project SiDock@home aimed at high-throughput virtual screening of a specially developed library of small compounds against a set of targets playing important roles in the life-cycle of the virus. The originality of the screening library and the molecular docking software allows us to obtain new knowledge about chemical space in relation to SARS-CoV-2. At the same time, the existing volunteer computing community provides us with a large computational power. Having risen to a size of a modern supercomputer in several months, SiDock@home becomes an independent general drug discovery project, with its first mission targeting SARS-CoV-2.

Supported by the Scholarship of the President of the Russian Federation for young scientists and graduate students (project SP-609.2021.5), the Slovenian Ministry of Science and Education infrastructure, project grant HPC-RIVR, by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS), programme P2-0046 and J1-2471, the Physical Chemistry programme grant P1-0201; Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sports programme grant OP20.04342.

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Acknowledgements

The first initial library (one billion of compounds) was prepared with the generous help of Microsoft that donated computational resources in the Azure cloud platform [6]. We all from COVID.SI are grateful and looking forward to future collaborations.

We wholeheartedly thank all BOINC participants for their contributions.

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Correspondence to Natalia Nikitina .

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Nikitina, N., Manzyuk, M., Podlipnik, Č., Jukić, M. (2021). Volunteer Computing Project SiDock@home for Virtual Drug Screening Against SARS-CoV-2. In: Byrski, A., Czachórski, T., Gelenbe, E., Grochla, K., Murayama, Y. (eds) Computer Science Protecting Human Society Against Epidemics. ANTICOVID 2021. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 616. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86582-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86582-5_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-86582-5

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