AI-driven prediction of SARS-CoV-2 variant binding trends from atomistic simulations
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AbstractWe present a novel technique to predict binding affinity trends between two molecules from atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. The technique uses a neural network algorithm applied to a series of images encoding the distance between two molecules in time. We demonstrate that our algorithm is capable of separating with high accuracy mutations with low binding affinity from mutations with high binding affinity. Moreover, we show high accuracy in prediction using a small subset of the simulation, therefore requiring a much shorter simulation time. We apply our algorithm to the binding between several variants of the the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and the human receptor ACE2.