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How you and your laptop can help Rutgers tackle the Zika virus

While you sleep, your laptop could be helping to find a treatment for the Zika virus, says a Rutgers researcher who has been tapped to oversee a worldwide computer project.

The World Community Grid, sponsored by IBM, uses the idle “screensaver” time on more than three million computers – both private and institutional – to narrow down treatment prospects.

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Rutgers scientists aiding in Zika research project

IBM is sponsoring the project using its World Community Grid. The grid aids scientists by harnessing the unused computing power of volunteers’ computers and Android devices.

Anyone with an Internet-connected computer or Android smartphone or tablet can download an app that runs the program while their computer is idle. When the computer’s CPU is in use, the app disengages, Freundlich said.

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Rutgers scientists aiding in Zika research project

Scientists at Rutgers are playing a role in the search for a cure for the Zika virus, and they’re seeking the public’s help.

Alex Perryman, a research teaching specialist at Rutgers’ New Jersey Medical School, and Joel Freundlich, associate professor of pharmacology and physiology and medicine, are part of a supercomputing project that screens current drugs and millions of drug-like compounds against models of Zika protein structures.

The results will be shared with the research community and the general public. The compounds that show the most promise will then be tested in laboratory settings.

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Rutgers researchers using power of Web to help stop Zika

A global project led by researchers at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark is using a crowd-sourced supercomputer network to test potential cures for the Zika virus, the infection expected to spread into the southern United States this summer.

You can help: Just download an app to allow the IBM-sponsored “world community grid” to use your computer when it’s idle.

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Rapid, Low-Cost Detection of Zika Virus Using Programmable Biomolecular Components

Here, we report a pipeline for the rapid design, assembly, and validation of cell-free, paper-based sensors for the detection of the Zika virus RNA genome. By linking isothermal RNA amplification to toehold switch RNA sensors, we detect clinically relevant concentrations of Zika virus sequences and demonstrate specificity against closely related Dengue virus sequences.

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Fight Zika by making your smartphone into a supercomputer

You can help find a drug that could knock out the Zika virus, while you’re playing Candy Crush on your smartphone.

An international research effort to identify potential drug compounds to combat the virus is being launched on a tech platform that turns a network of volunteers’ personal computers, as well as Android mobile phones and tablets, into a virtual supercomputer that can speedily process millions of calculations.

The #OpenZika project, announced Thursday, will run virtual experiments on potential compounds that could form drugs to address Zika. It’s the latest health-related research project by IBM‘s World Community Grid.

After a dozen years of operation, the platform has almost 750,000 people and 470 institutions across 80 countries, allowing researchers to tap their 3.5 million computers and mobile devices for latent processing power. The World Community Grid has been used to research diseases including malaria, Ebola, tuberculosis and childhood neuroblastoma.

 

Fight Zika by making your smartphone into a supercomputer

IBM’s World Community Grid links volunteers’ personal computers and mobile devices to form a supercomputer for massive, fast research.

Read more at: www.cnbc.com/2016/05/18/fight-zika-by-making-your-smartphone-into-a-supercomputer.html

 

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Announcing a World Community Grid Project: OpenZika

An idea starts out as a response to a challenge and becomes a fully-fledged scientific research project. Then before you know it, it becomes a global project involving thousands of people, and you are writing a blog about it.

It began as I pondered “how can I, a scientist without a lab” make a difference with a disease like the Zika virus infection that is garnering global attention? When all you have is a computer and your wits, it may seem an uphill battle. I knew that gathering a cadre of collaborators would provide the support needed and, more importantly, the different perspectives and experience to gather momentum and have impact. This was the start of Zika Open (as it was initially known)—an open science collaboration. It began a few months ago in January 2016, by reaching out to Priscilla Yang, Ph.D., at Harvard University, which then led me to build a homology model of the glycoprotein E—a target on the surface of Zika virus. I also connected to Carolina Horta Andrade, Ph.D., at Federal University of Goias in Brazil, with whom I had collaborated on a Dengue virus project. From there we gathered other collaborators which led to us collaboratively writing a perspective submitted to F1000Research.

 

By Sean Ekins

 

 

Announcing a World Community Grid Project: OpenZika | AAPS Blog

By Sean Ekins An idea starts out as a response to a challenge and becomes a fully-fledged scientific research project. Then before you know it, it becomes a global project involving thousands of people, and you are writing a blog about it. It began as I pondered “how can I, a scientist without a lab” make…

Read more at: aapsblog.aaps.org/2016/05/19/announcing-a-world-community-grid-project-openzika/

 

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Fighting the Zika virus with the power of supercomputing

The project, known as OpenZika, employs a global team of scientists who will perform “virtual” experiments in a search of treatments for the fast-spreading virus that the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency.

OpenZika will screen current drugs and millions of drug-like compounds from existing databases against models of Zika protein structures (and also against structures of proteins from related viruses, including West Nile Virus and Dengue). These computational results will be shared quickly with the research community and general public, with compounds showing the most promise then tested in laboratory settings.

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Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-zika-virus-power-supercomputing.html#jCp

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Zika Treatment Search Launched, Fueled By IBM’s World Community Grid

IBM’s (NYSE: IBMWorld Community Grid and scientists are launching an international study to identify drug candidates to cure Zika, a fast spreading virus that the World Health Organization has declared a global public health emergency.

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Review article: Zika Virus

This review describes the current understanding of the epidemiology, transmission, clinical characteristics, and diagnosis of Zika virus infection, as well as the future outlook with regard to this disease.

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