Post Bulletin reports...

Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Hormel Institute in Austin have created a tool to predictively model viruses.

In a Wednesday, Nov. 4, news release, the institute says the FoldaVirus tool has modeled the probable structures of nearly 700 viruses so far. Though there are more than 280,000 known viruses, just 156, as of 2024, have had their structures confirmed through cryoEM bioimaging.

“If we know the structure of a virus that causes a devastating disease, we can use the structural information to identify the regions that virus uses to interact with cells, and more,” said Vijay Reddy, the associate professor at the Hormel Institute whose lab created FoldaVirus. “We can use this information to develop therapeutics like vaccines, neutralizing antibodies, or as viral vectors to deliver specific genes to the cells to prevent the spread of harmful viruses.”

The FoldaVirus tool, which utilizes the Google-developed AlphaFold artificial intelligence system, uses existing information about a particular virus and its family of viruses to predict that virus’s structure. Each model is scored for how likely its predictive structure matches the real thing.

The research team published its work in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.