COVID-19 : past, present and future by Stephane Teletchea@MASIM SARS Cov2 event (Nov 2020)
Channel: GT-MASIM
Date: 2020-12-28

Presentation delivered by Stephane Teletchea (PhD, Prof@Univ. de Nantes, France) during a series of talks organized in Nov 2020 by the French MASIM research group, dedicated to the structural bioinformatics aspects of SARS-CoV-2 research.


"COVID-19 : past, present and future"
Abstract: 2020 saw the emergence of a new pandemic virus spreading so rapidly that we had no other disease-control strategy than to confine humans. The exact virus origin is still under scrutiny, but the knowledge acquired in less than one year on the virus’ biology has ramped up at a rate never seen before. In particular, the structural characterization of the COVID-19 genome and proteome has allowed a giant leap into the understanding of the virus organization and function. This enormous deciphering work led to a nearly complete characterization ofthe atomic protein structures. Yet, after a careful genome analysis, surprises about the number of open reading frames encoded in the RNA still happened. The presentation will start with a rapid introduction about the virus biology and the associated diseases, then will follow with the virus genome and proteome description. Ongoing efforts for fighting against the virus with (new) chemical entities or vaccines will be highlighted the discuss the most promising strategies for 2021 and beyond.


MASIM is a research group within the French CNRS research network for bioinformatics (GdR BIM). Its goal is to promote collaborations and the dissemination of algorithmic methods for structural bioinformatics through an interdisciplinary dialogue involving, but not limited to, Biologists, Computer scientists, Physicists, Chemists and beyond.