The Coronavirus Structural Task Force

As methods developers in structural biology, or more exactly, for crystallography and electron cryo microscopy, we usually work far from the spotlight. But when the COVID-19 pandemic started, we wondered: how could we contribute to the fight against the virus?

As early as February 2020, we started evaluating the structures of macromolecules in SARS-CoV and later SARS-CoV-2 available from the Protein Data Bank - and found many could be improved by modern methods. We set up a website (www.insidecorona.net) and a database containing our evaluation and revised models; we met online every day, working on an automatic structure evaluation and revising individual structures. We also engaged in outreach activities, writing blog posts about the structural biology of SARS-CoV-2 aimed at both the scientific community and the general public and refined molecular structures live on Twitch - we even offered the first scientifically accurate 3D printable virus model for schools.

In the beginning, there were no tenured academics in the Coronavirus Structural Task Force [1]; we were an ad hoc collaboration of mostly junior researchers across nine time zones, brought together by the desire to fight the pandemic. We lacked management experience, computing facilities and administrative infrastructure. Still, we were able to rapidly establish a large network of COVID-19 related research, forge friendships and collaborations across national boundaries, spread knowledge about the structural biology of the virus and provide improved models for many in-silico drug discovery projects. And so, we may have gotten into the spotlight after all...

[1] Croll, T., Diederichs, K., Fischer, F., Fyfe, C., Gao, Y., Horrell, S., Joseph, A. P., Kandler, L., Kippes, O., Kirsten, F., Müller, K., Nolte, K., Payne, A., Reeves, M. G., Richardson, J., Santoni, G., Stäb, S., Tronrud, D., Williams, C. & Thorn, A. (2020). BioRxiv. doi:10.1101/2020.10.07.307546.

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