WELLINGTON: A team of international researchers has developed a high-tech method to explore the possibilities of how the coronavirus could evolve to prepare for future variants using artificial intelligence (AI).

William Kelton, a researcher at the University of Waikato in the city of Hamilton in northern New Zealand, has been working with international partners from Switzerland's ETH Zurich and the University of Geneva, among others, to take proteins from the coronavirus' surface into the laboratory and create artificial mutations from them. They would screen the mutations to learn which ones allow binding to cells.