Ligand Docking and an update
So an update.
I was laid off from my field service engineer job about a month ago. Reason being a combination of unpaid invoices and COVID19 reduced service calls. Fortunately I could get a decent unemployment check, and should be getting the additional $600 a week from the CARE act.
In the meantime I have been studying In Silico Drug Design, Virology and Python. This all ties into Bioinformatics which after much vacillating over the past year I decided should be my next career. I am a biochemist after all, or was at one point. I am not giving up on Transmission Electron Microscopes tho, and I plan to go back into it as a consultant when the time is right. I also wish to set one up in my garage, when I buy a house. It will probably be one just like the one I blogged about 2 years ago ish. That would be a Philips EM420. In the meantime, I am making the best of what is.
I gotta say I really like the ligand docking part of In Silico Drug Design. I attached two screenshots of a experiment with binding a natural product, Quercetin to the Main Protease of SARSCoV2. One is a ball and stick model of the molecule the other a space filling model representing the electron clouds.
I read a paper recently about natural product inhibitors of various viruses(1). One compound, Myrecitin was shown to inhibit SARS Main Protease, which has something like 95% percent homology with the Main Protease in SARSCoV2, so I did a structure based search of the ZINC database and found a bunch of potential analogs. That is how I came across Quercetin, which I then found later that some other people came to the same conclusion prior to me. Not a disappointment tho, but more validation. There was actually going to be a clinical trial of Quercetin, but I do not known what its status is.
Sooo...I guess I have more time to get back on here. SO whats the status of STEEMIT right now? I hope everyone I know on here is okay. If STEEMIT is not a ghost town, I will be more than happy to blog about In Silico Drug design as I go through the learning process.
(1) Antiviral Natural Products and Herbal Medicines
Liang-Tzung Lin, Dr.,1,** Wen-Chan Hsu,2 and Chun-Ching Lin, Dr.2,*
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4032839/
