Assessment of phytochemicals present in Indian indigenous plants through in silico methods for CoVID19 targeting and treatment.

WHO dashboard displays a rapid rise in infected CoVID19 patients. While social distancing and lockdown are useful, a more viable idea would be to invest in development of medicinal drugs both for prophylaxis as well as treatment of patients. Many existing anti-viral medications are being repurposed. Unfortunately, none of the current medication strategies are optimum and vaccine development will take more than one year. In this project, we will screen phytochemicals for anti-CoVID19 activity through interaction with CoVID19 specific targets using in silico methods such as molecular modeling. We have made a roadmap for our study with checkpoints to assess the success at each step. The main steps include extensive literature analysis to confirm anti-viral activity of chosen phytoconstituents, Druggability analysis, Molecular docking preparation (ligand and target) and execution and confirmation through advanced in silico methods. Although our team (one trained Postdoc as PI, one PhD student and two Masters students) is prepared to execute this project at our laboratory, we envisage requirement of high-performance computing, access to advanced software and remote storage. Our early comparison of the herbal chemical moieties suggests that Indian medicinal herbs have phytoconstituents that may show great promise as anti-CoVID19 drugs. This project will directly influence the anti-viral drug development for CoVID19 and thus has very high impact.