#90 – Dmitry Korkin: Computational Biology of Coronavirus

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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EPISODE LINKS:
Dmitry’s Website: http://korkinlab.org/
Dmitry’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dmkorkin
Dmitry’s Paper that we discuss: https://bit.ly/3eKghEM


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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you
should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.


OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
02:33 – Viruses are terrifying and fascinating
06:02 – 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