Gozde Usta

Gozde Usta


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

6Years (2021-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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17 December 2021 in Crystals
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
OGOmur Guven
Omur Guven
Mehmet GulMehmet Gul
Mehmet Gul
EAEsra Ayan
Esra Ayan
JJJ Austin Johnson
J Austin Johnson
Baris CakilkayaBaris Cakilkaya
Baris Cakilkaya
Hasan DeMirciHasan DeMirci
Hasan DeMirci
Since early 2020, COVID-19 has grown to affect the lives of billions globally. A worldwide investigation has been ongoing for characterizing the virus and also for finding an effective drug and developing vaccines. As time has been of the essence, a crucial part of this research has been drug repurposing; therefore, confirmation of in silico drug screening studies have been carried out for this purpose. Here we demonstrated the possibility of screening a variety of drugs efficiently by leveraging a high data collection rate of 120 images/second with the new low-noise, high dynamic range ePix10k2M Pixel Array Detector installed at the Macromolecular Femtosecond Crystallography (MFX) instrument at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) is used for remote high-throughput data collection for drug repurposing of the main protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV-2 at ambient temperature with mitigated X-ray radiation damage. We obtained multiple structures soaked with nine drug candidate molecules in two crystal forms. Although our drug binding attempts failed, we successfully established a high-throughput Serial Femtosecond X-ray crystallographic (SFX) data collection protocol.