Research

Ubiquitin-like with PHD and RING finger domains 1 (UHRF1) is an essential factor for the maintenance of mammalian DNA methylation and harbors several reader modules for recognizing epigenetic marks. The tandem Tudor domain (TTD) of UHRF1 has a peptide-binding groove that functions as a binding platform for intra- or intermolecular interactions. Besides the groove interacting with unphosphorylated linker 2 and spacer of UHRF1, it also interacts with di/tri-methylated histone H3 at Lys9 and DNA ligase 1 (LIG1) at Lys126. Here we focus on the phosphorylation of Ser298 in linker 2, which was implied to regulate the ligand-binding property of the TTD.

Materials chemists develop chemical compounds to meet often conflicting demands of industrial applications. This process may not be properly modeled by black-box optimization because the target property is not well defined in some cases. Herein, we propose a new algorithm for automated materials discovery called BoundLess Objective-free eXploration (BLOX) that uses a novel criterion based on kernel-based Stein discrepancy in the property space.