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The COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose a substantial threat to human lives and is likely to do so for years to come. Despite the availability of vaccines, searching for efficient small-molecule drugs that are widely available, including in low- and middle-income countries, is an ongoing challenge. In this work, we report the results of a community effort, the “Billion molecules against Covid-19 challenge”, to identify small-molecule inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2 or relevant human receptors. Participating teams used a wide variety of computational methods to screen a minimum of 1 billion virtual molecules against 6 protein targets. Overall, 31 teams participated, and they suggested a total of 639,024 potentially active molecules, which were subsequently ranked to find ‘consensus compounds’. The organizing team coordinated with various contract research organizations (CROs) and collaborating institutions to synthesize and test 878 compounds for activity against proteases (Nsp5, Nsp3, TMPRSS2), nucleocapsid N, RdRP (Nsp12 domain), and (alpha) spike protein S. Overall, 27 potential inhibitors were experimentally confirmed by binding-, cleavage-, and/or viral suppression assays and are presented here. All results are freely available and can be taken further downstream without IP restrictions. Overall, we show the effectiveness of computational techniques, community efforts, and communication across research fields (i.e., protein expression and crystallography, in silico modeling, synthesis and biological assays) to accelerate the early phases of drug discovery.

Relative binding free energy calculations in drug design are becoming a useful tool in facilitating lead binding affinity optimization in a cost- and time-efficient manner. However, they have been limited by technical challenges such as the manual creation of large numbers of input files to set up, run, and analyze free energy simulations. In this Application Note, we describe FEPrepare, a novel web-based tool, which automates the setup procedure for relative binding FEP calculations for the dual-topology scheme of NAMD, one of the major MD engines, using OPLS-AA force field topology and parameter files. FEPrepare provides the user with all necessary files needed to run a FEP/MD simulation with NAMD. FEPrepare can be accessed and used at https://feprepare.vi-seem.eu/.

In this paper is analyzed and simulated on the computer the operation of a three level H-bridge converter as well as its parallel operations. Based on the simulation results the operating behavior between a) a three level H-bridge neutral point clamped converter, b) a three level H-bridge neutral point clamped converter with parallel elements and c) two three level H-bridge neutral point clamped converters parallel connected is being compared. From the simulation results is obvious that in the first two cases the ripples, the distortion in primary and secondary winding currents, and the power factor are quite satisfactory and almost identical to each other. In the third case as compared with the first two, we observe that current harmonics with higher amplitude appear in the primary winding of the transformer.

In this paper, a photovoltaic (P/V) system, with maximum power point tracking (MPPT), connected to a three phase grid is presented. The connection of photovoltaic system on the grid takes place in one stage using voltage source inverter (VSI). For a better utilization of the photovoltaic system, the control strategy applied is based on p-q theory. According to this strategy during sunlight the system sends active power to the grid and at the same time compensates the reactive power of the load. In case there is no sunlight (during the night for instance), the inverter only compensates the reactive power of the load. The advantage of this strategy is the operation of the photovoltaic system the whole day. In this paper the p-q theory is proposed, which does not demand the use of PLL and introduces simple algebraic calculations.

© 2012 Tsengenes and Adamidis, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Performance Evaluation of PI and Fuzzy Controlled Power Electronic Inverters for Power Quality Improvement