Foldit

inkycatz Lv 1

June 30, 2015

We're revisiting Ebola and the Marburg virus with an upcoming series of puzzles! The team has indicated we'll be starting with some Marburg puzzles, although it is highly likely more Ebola puzzles will also appear.

Marburg virus disease (MVD) (formerly known as Marburg haemorrhagic fever) is a severe and highly fatal disease caused by a virus from the same family as the one that causes Ebola virus disease.

Find out what's going on lately with these puzzles and posts:
Mutate and Marburg, started by Susume

With that in mind and to get everyone back up to speed on this topic, we've compiled some of our previous efforts in this area. Feel free to check out our blogs:
Feedback on the last Marburg design puzzle (1073)
Review our blog post, talking about Puzzle 1000
Continuing the battle against Ebola

As well as check out previous related puzzles:
1144: How low can you go? 10-residue Marburg binder design
1117: Ultra-compact 17-residue Marburg virus inhibitor
1112: Compact 25-residue Marburg virus inhibitor
1108: Compact 37-Residue Marburg Virus Inhibitor Design
1073: Marburg Binder Design with Disulfides
1000: Breach Ebola's Defences!
975: Ebola glycoprotein 30-residue inhibitory peptide design
971c: Ebola glycoprotein peptide inhibitor design
884b: 74 Residue Ebola Binder Design
879: Ebola Binder Design with Disulfides
846: Ebola hotspot discovery

For more reading, when we were running frequent puzzles of these types before, spmm noted that Science/AAAS has a suite of free Ebola articles which are interesting, reasonably easy to read, and also have links to more complex papers and articles.

Additional information:
World Health Organization Ebola portal
The Mayo Clinic

As always, the Foldit team remains committed to research in this area and appreciates everyone's assistance on these puzzles!

Vredeman Lv 1

July 01, 2015

An idea that may or may not be useful or possible.
It would perhaps be interesting to know if we could see what the protein looks like in the primate to which the ebola virus binds. From there we may be able to reverse engineer a binding segment that imitates the bond. It might be interesting to compare it with the protein of non primates to see where the differences and similarities are. From there we may be able to create a binder that binds even better than that of a primate and thus form a barrier between the ebola and us.