Dmitry Korkin is a professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he specializes in bioinformatics of complex disease, computational genomics, systems biology, and biomedical data analytics. I came across Dmitry’s work when in February his group used the viral genome of the COVID-19 to reconstruct the 3D structure of its major viral proteins and their interactions with human proteins, in effect creating a structural genomics map of the coronavirus and making this data open and available to researchers everywhere. We talked about the biology of COVID-19, SARS, and viruses in general, and how computational methods can help us understand their structure and function in order to develop antiviral drugs and vaccines.
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OUTLINE:
0:00 – Introduction
2:33 – Viruses are terrifying and fascinating
6:02 – How hard is it to engineer a virus?
10:48 – What makes a virus contagious?
29:52 – Figuring out the function of a protein
53:27 – Functional regions of viral proteins
1:19:09 – Biology of a coronavirus treatment
1:34:46 – Is a virus alive?
1:37:05 – Epidemiological modeling
1:55:27 – Russia
2:02:31 – Science bobbleheads
2:06:31 – Meaning of life
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