R@H Project: Fighting COVID-19

Adventure Science Center is contributing to global scientific research efforts to fight diseases such as COVID-19 by enabling the use of their powerful Sudekum Planetarium servers through a platform run by the University of California, Berkeley, with support from the National Science Foundation. The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a volunteer, crowdsourced computing platform that downloads scientific computing jobs to remote computers and runs programs in an effort to advance important research. Adventure Science Center is giving BOINC researchers access to their servers for use in the critical Rosetta@home (R@h) project from the University of Washington. The R@h project is seeking to model important COVID-19 proteins and predict their three-dimensional shapes. Knowledge gained from studying these viral proteins is now being used to guide the design of novel vaccines and antiviral drugs. Along with COVID-19, the R@h project will also be helping efforts at designing new proteins to fight diseases such as HIV, malaria, cancer and Alzheimer’s.

Anyone with a computer is able to join the effort. By running R@h on your computer when you’re not using it, you’ll speed up and extend efforts to design new proteins and to predict their 3-dimensional shapes. Learn more at boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta.