Speaker
Description
The COVID-19 epidemic created an extraordinary situation for the whole humanity, claiming millions of lives and causing a significant economic setback. At the same time, the international research community has rapidly generated an order of magnitude larger data set than ever before, which can contribute to understanding the evolution and dynamics of the epidemic, to its containment and to the prevention of similar pandemics. Although genetic sequences are available in a never before seen amount (as of April 2022, more than 10 million complete sequences at GISAID) a key question is what kind of phenotypic changes the mutations cause and if we can estimate the virulence or severity of a certain variant solely from the sequence. Recently a so-called "deep mutational scanning" database became available in which receptor binding affinities are measured for tens of thousands of mutations in several variants. We will calculate the 3D structure to these variants with GPU accelerated AlphaFold software and prepare the resulting database for further machine learning analysis.
