13. Acknowledgements

13. Acknowledgements

These computational projects would not be possible without the open-source software which allows us all free access to the programmes and techniques necessary for this research. For this we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all of those who have been involved in these open-source software projects and made this possible.

For the organisation of these drug discovery projects for current and future MSc/MRes students we must thank Professor Alethea Tabor, Professor Jon Wilden, Professor Matthew Todd and our consulting expert Dr Chris Swain. Together they have made these research projects a reality for students and enabled the delivery of remote support for all students taking on these projects.

A special thanks to all those listed above who have been involved in making this laboratory manual, and also to Dr Hugh Britton who tested the tutorials. For our cluster support and remote access, we would like to thank Dr Frank Otto.

A note from the authors:

This guide has been written by two former students who undertook computational drug discovery projects as an alternative to their synthetic chemistry research projects due to the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. As authors we have endeavoured to deliver all the necessary instructions to new students in a manageable and easily accessible way in order to ease the transition for students whose prior experience with computational techniques is little to none. We hope to have reduced the stress involved in tackling such a new field of research and have tried to put together all the information we wish we had at the start of our projects. We aim to have helped you to avoid the teething issues that we had when embarking on these projects and hope you will be more confident in your future research as a result. These projects are extremely independent and can be daunting at first but rest assured that you are all more than capable of adapting to these new areas. There is a lot of support available to students and we encourage you to fully engage with these. In particular the slack forums (which you will all be introduced to) are a great source of information and help from experts and other students. If you are struggling with something the chances are someone else is too, or maybe even your question has already been answered. You may not be directly in a lab with other students and people around to help but they are only one forum post away!

Bethanie Clent, BA (Hons), MSc Yuhang Wang, BEng (Hons), MRes