Folding@home In Practice

Sergio Perez Conesa explains how Folding@home has helped his work in the field of biochemistry

BY IAN EVENDEN

A computational chemist undertaking a postdoctoral study at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, Sergio Perez Conesa uses Folding@home in the hope of uncovering a new drug or treatment for common illnesses associated with ion channels.

Sergio Perez Conesa spoke to MaximumPC about his use of Folding@home.

Maximum PC: Hi Sergio, thanks for talking to us. Can you give us an overview and insight into what it is you do, and what your work entails?

Sergio Perez Conesa:

I have training in chemistry, but my work is multidisciplinary. I use a lot of physics, a lot of programming, and a lot of biochemistry, and ideas from biology, too. Our main tool is the computer, and the systems we want to understand are biological, but the way to do this is to understand the physics, and this we can get using a computer.

MPC: That’s interesting. Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic is at the forefront of everyone’s minds—did your research factor into that, and can you tell us about your work with the COVID virus?

SPC: Most of the work that has been done on the coronavirus has been done on the spike protein, which is the main protein that is outside on the surface of the virus. But since we work primarily with ion channels [proteins that form a semipermeable membrane that only allows ions of a certain size or charge to pass through them; they’re present in the membranes of every single one of our cells, and are a prominent component of the nervous system], we tried to study the e-protein, which is a different protein in the membrane, in the outer part of the virus. There was very little structural information about that protein, so we didn’t have very good models to start with, and we tried to use Folding@home to see if when simulating this protein, we would be able to fold it or rearrange it in some way, so that it would have a better structure. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen.