Chapter 15 Easy to catch
Lin Jia found it hard to imagine Chen Yuanguang’s thought process and his mental state when he made this decision.

Chen Yuanguang said lightly: "Yes, the Science Fiction World WeChat public account I followed at the time pushed me the news of the Science Fiction Rising Star Competition. I clicked in and saw that the final jury invited Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Michael Levitt to participate.

I thought that at the very least I could get a bronze medal, and as long as I had the chance to meet Levitt Michael, I would be confident that he would write me a letter of recommendation. "

Lin Jia said helplessly: "Yuan Guang, your imagination is really big, normal people can't think of it and don't have this ability.

Not only were you able to think of it, but you were also able to turn it into reality, and not only did you win an award, but it was a gold award.

I'm about to upgrade the image of you in my mind. From now on, your precondition will be omnipotent, hahaha." Lin Jia was very happy because Chen Yuanguang's progress was so smooth, which meant that the probability of applying to American universities was greatly increased.

She was well aware of how powerful an endorsement from a Nobel Prize winner could be in her application to American universities.

To put it bluntly, it is equivalent to a Nobel Prize winner using his own reputation to guarantee to the professor who submitted your application letter to you that you can do a good job.

It should be known that Levitt will join Fudan in September this year to establish the Institute of Multiscale Complex Systems and serve as honorary dean. He wrote very few letters of recommendation during his teaching at Fudan.

Because the news of winning the award spread quickly, especially within Jiangnan University, Lin Jia, former roommates, counselors, etc. almost took turns to call him to congratulate him.

Chen Yuanguang was thinking, it would be great if there was an AI that could simulate his voice to help him answer these calls. This function will be very mature in future mobile phones, but it will not be of much use.

Because there will be no harassing phone calls in the future and the relationships between people will be atomized to the extreme, this type of AI anti-telephone harassment function is a product of the times and it exists but is of little use.

"Hello, Mr. Levitt. I am the gold medal winner of the Science Fiction Rising Star Competition and also your fan."

Tencent arranged for him to meet in the conference room of the hotel where Levitt was staying. In addition to the two of them, Guo Wei was also there. Levitt smiled and shook hands with Chen Yuanguang and said, "Hello, I like your work too, it's very interesting.

There are many interesting predictions about the future in it.”

Chen Yuanguang said: "This is probably because I pay more attention to science and cutting-edge technology, so I can make some interesting achievements.

Sir, the main reason I want to see you this time is that I want you to correct a paper I have written. I have constructed a computer simulation method to simulate the directed evolution of proteins.

This method only requires the physical and chemical characteristics of the protein and sequence information to simulate protein directed evolution.

The protein DHR8 is the subject of my research. Through computer simulation, I evolved it to have the ability to bind to DNA or RNA.

Before simulating evolution, I first constructed an evaluation library of 30 pentapeptide repeat proteins for sequence diversity and nucleic acid binding.

Pentatricopeptide repeat proteins are proven RNA-binding proteins with clear binding sites that have been systematically characterized.

In this way, each PPR in my evaluation library will have two clear binding sites. We will take each binding site as the center and use a short sequence of 13 amino acids as an evaluation window, so there will be a total of 60 evaluation windows.

For each short sequence of the evaluation window, we use 544 indicators in the existing database that describe the physicochemical properties of amino acids to represent amino acids. Therefore, the amino acid at each site will be a 544×1 matrix, and thirteen such matrices are combined to represent a peptide sequence of length 13. For a 544×13 matrix of an evaluation window, I optimized the K-means++ algorithm, and then used the optimized algorithm for clustering, clustering the 544 row vectors into 50 categories. In terms of visualization, each category represents a waveform. For each category, we can use the arithmetic mean of each column of the matrix subset contained in the category to generate the iconic waveform of the category. "

After Chen Yuanguang handed the printed paper to Levitt, he briefly introduced his ideas.

One of Levitt's important work directions is protein simulation, which involves predicting protein structure through computational analysis of protein sequences and focusing on homology modeling.

The paper written by Chen Yuanguang is highly consistent with his direction, and the ideas and algorithm optimizations embodied are of very high value.

At first, Levitt was a little skeptical, because he knew that the other party was still a senior student. He felt that the paper he produced was just a paper written to find a topic, and at best it was a good summary review.

Unexpectedly, they used their best tricks right from the start. Both the designed calculation rules and the optimization of the classic clustering algorithm K-means++ were full of thought.

"Great work." Levitt commented and then discussed some details in the paper with Chen Yuanguang.

Guo Wei fell into a state of doubt about his life. Who am I? Where am I?
Guo Wei joined Tencent in 13 and became a senior manager of Tencent Video within 5 years. He is also a graduate of a prestigious university. Because he often needs to go abroad for copyright management, his English has not fallen behind. He is not a theoretical person who has passed the CET- and CET- exams, and his English is not good, but he can have a conversation in English.

He just saw Chen Yuanguang and Levitt saying "nice to meet you", and then Chen Yuanguang handed a stack of papers to Levitt. He couldn't understand what the two sides were talking about at all. There were a lot of professional terms, and he couldn't understand what they meant even by guessing.

Guo Wei thought, are young people nowadays so fierce?
"Yes, that's right. There are reserved areas to prevent the internal helical hydrogen bond interaction points of DHR8 from being destroyed, and to avoid destroying the repetitive protein structure motif. This design is correct. Such simulations can simulate the real situation while limiting mutations to a certain range."

“Great idea, keep running random simulations, then pick the one with the smallest difference as the best match, and then compare it with the waveform to calculate the goodness of fit.”

Levitt praised Chen Yuanguang's paper highly. Originally, Levitt had reserved fifteen minutes for this conversation, but after talking for more than two hours, he was still a little reluctant to leave.

"Yuan Guang, your paper is only missing one thing, and that is an experiment to verify your theory. Use your simulation method to transform DRH8 into a short peptide that can bind to nucleic acids.

If you have that, you can publish the paper in Nature. If you don’t have that, you can still publish it, but you may only publish it in a subsidiary journal,” Levitt said.

Chen Yuanguang replied: "I have an idea. I will apply to the school later and perfect it."

Because there was no laboratory available for him to use, Chen Yuanguang's paper was entirely computational simulation, lacking experimental verification.

Levitt asked, “Did you write this paper alone or with someone else?”

Just from the communication between the two sides just now, Levitt knew that the main contributor to this paper must be Chen Yuanguang, because he explained the ideas and designs in it very clearly.

Chen Yuanguang said: "I am alone."

Levitt said: “When you publish it in Nature, if you don’t mind, you can list me as the second author, so that it will definitely be published in Nature.”

(End of this chapter)