PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Maxwell I. Zimmerman
AU  - Justin R. Porter
AU  - Michael D. Ward
AU  - Sukrit Singh
AU  - Neha Vithani
AU  - Artur Meller
AU  - Upasana L. Mallimadugula
AU  - Catherine E. Kuhn
AU  - Jonathan H. Borowsky
AU  - Rafal P. Wiewiora
AU  - Matthew F. D. Hurley
AU  - Aoife M Harbison
AU  - Carl A Fogarty
AU  - Joseph E. Coffland
AU  - Elisa Fadda
AU  - Vincent A. Voelz
AU  - John D. Chodera
AU  - Gregory R. Bowman
TI  - Citizen Scientists Create an Exascale Computer to Combat COVID-19
AID  - 10.1101/2020.06.27.175430
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.06.27.175430
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/30/2020.06.27.175430.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/30/2020.06.27.175430.full
AB  - The SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic continues to threaten global health and socioeconomic stability. Experiments have revealed snapshots of many of the viral components but remain blind to moving parts of these molecular machines. To capture these essential processes, over a million citizen scientists have banded together through the Folding@home distributed computing project to create the world’s first Exascale computer and simulate protein dynamics. An unprecedented 0.1 seconds of simulation of the viral proteome reveal how the spike complex uses conformational masking to evade an immune response, conformational changes implicated in the function of other viral proteins, and ‘cryptic’ pockets that are absent in experimental snapshots. These structures and mechanistic insights present new targets for the design of therapeutics.This living document will be updated as we perform further analysis and make the data publicly accessible.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.