VirCAD - An HPC Platform for Viral Engineering
Team Members:
Abijith Augustine
Mentors:
Stefan N Lukianov
Abstract
Viruses possess the innate ability to deliver genetic materials and modify the natural genetic code in living organisms, but their natural gene delivery properties often fall short of human therapeutic needs. VirCAD, a novel Computer-Aided Design (CAD) platform, leverages the power of AI and cloud computing to accelerate the design and simulation of these viral vectors. Using OmegaFold and other bioinformatics tools like Smina, RING and PyMOL we demonstrated the interaction and docking of an E-coli and a bacteriophage. To incorporate remote usage we set up an azure instance and automated this process through a GUI application. The platform's architecture integrates a C++ based Qt Creator and wxWidgets GUI hosted on Azure for scalability, and connects with NCBI’s E-utilities API, facilitating real-time genomic data manipulation.
Abet Addendum
Abijith Augustine
The Team