#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. Support this podcast
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https://bit.ly/2MlvP5w 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 This conversation is part of the Artificial
Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more
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YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these
conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on
Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. 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