Obtained Easily

Lin Jia found it hard to imagine Chen Yuanguang's thought process and his state of mind when he made that decision.

Chen Yuanguang said lightly, "Yeah, at that time, the Science Fiction World official account I followed pushed the news about this Science Fiction New Star Competition. I clicked in and saw that the final judging panel would invite the Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Levitt Michael, to participate.

I thought that at worst I could get a bronze award. As long as I had a chance to meet Levitt Michael, I was confident I could get him to write me a recommendation letter."

Lin Jia said helplessly, "Yuanguang, your imagination is indeed big enough. Normal people wouldn't think of it and wouldn't have the ability.

Not only could you think of it, but you could actually make it a reality, and not only did you win an award, but it was the gold award.

I'm about to completely upgrade the image of you in my mind. From now on, your prefix will be 'omnipotent,' hahaha." Lin Jia was very happy because Chen Yuanguang's progress was so smooth, which meant the probability of getting into an American University had greatly increased.

She knew very well how powerful an endorsement from a Nobel laureate was in applying to American Universities.

To put it bluntly, it was equivalent to a Nobel laureate using their reputation to guarantee to the professor receiving your application that you could do the job well.

It's worth noting that Levitt would join Fudan University in September this year, establish the Multiscale Research Institute of Complex Systems, and serve as its honorary dean. The recommendation letters he wrote during his time teaching at Fudan were very few.

Because the news of winning the award spread quickly, especially within Jiang University, Lin Jia, former roommates, counselors, and others almost took turns calling him to congratulate him.

This made Chen Yuanguang think that it would be great if there was an AI that could simulate his voice to answer these kinds of calls. This function was already very mature in future mobile phones, but it wasn't very useful.

Because in the future there were no spam calls, and the relationship between people was atomized to the extreme. This kind of AI anti-spam call function was a product of the era; it existed but wasn't very useful.

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

Goose Factory arranged for him to meet Levitt in the hotel's conference room. Besides the two of them, Guo Wei was also present. Levitt smiled and shook hands with Chen Yuanguang, saying, "Hello, I also really like your work, it's very interesting.

Many of the predictions about the future in it are very interesting."

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

Sir, the main reason I'm seeing you this time is that I have a paper I'd like you to review. I have constructed a computer simulation method to simulate the directed evolution of proteins.

This method only needs to utilize the physicochemical characteristics and sequence information of proteins to achieve the simulation of protein directed evolution.

The research object I chose is Protein DHR8. Through computer simulation, I made it evolve the ability to bind DNA or RNA.

Before the simulated evolution, I first constructed an evaluation library containing 30 Penta-Peptide Repeat Proteins based on sequence diversity and nucleic acid binding.

Penta-Peptide Repeat Proteins are confirmed RNA-binding proteins, their binding sites are very clear and have been systematically characterized.

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

For the short sequence of each evaluation window, we use 544 indicators describing the physicochemical properties of amino acids from existing databases to represent the 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 that category to generate the characteristic waveform of that category."

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

One of Levitt's important research directions included protein simulation, predicting protein structure through computational analysis of protein sequences, focusing on homology modeling.

The paper Chen Yuanguang wrote was highly consistent with his direction, and the ideas and algorithm optimizations it embodied were of very high value.

At first, Levitt was somewhat dismissive because he knew the other party was a senior student. He thought the paper the other party presented was just written to find a topic, and at most it was a well-summarized review.

Unexpectedly, he immediately showed off a big move. Both the designed calculation rules and the optimization of the classic clustering algorithm K-means++ were full of thought.

"Excellent work." After Levitt commented, he discussed some detailed issues in the paper with Chen Yuanguang.

Meanwhile, Guo Wei was in a state of existential doubt, Who am I, where am I?

Guo Wei joined Goose Factory in 2013 and became a senior manager at Goose Factory Video in five years. He also graduated from a prestigious university. Because he often needed to travel abroad for copyright operations, his English hadn't fallen behind. He wasn't the theoretical type who just passed the CET-4 and CET-6 exams; while he didn't speak perfectly, he could converse directly in English.

He only saw Chen Yuanguang and Levitt exchange "nice to meet you," then Chen Yuanguang handed Levitt a stack of papers. After that, he couldn't understand their conversation at all. There were so many technical terms that he couldn't even guess what they meant.

Guo Wei thought, Are young people this formidable now?

"Exactly, exactly, that's right. There are reserved regions to prevent the destruction of the internal helical hydrogen bonds of DHR8, avoiding damage to the repeat protein structural motif. This design is correct. This kind of simulation can both simulate real conditions and limit mutations to a certain range."

"Excellent idea. Continuously simulate randomly, then select the one with the smallest difference as the best match, and then compare it with the waveform to calculate the goodness of fit."

Levitt greatly praised Chen Yuanguang's paper. Originally, Levitt had allocated fifteen minutes for this conversation, but now they had talked for over two hours, and he was still a bit reluctant to leave.

"Yuanguang, your paper is only missing one thing, and that is experimental verification of your theory. Use your simulation method to modify DRH8 into a short peptide that can bind to nucleic acids.

With that, this paper can be published in Nature. Without it, it can still be published, but perhaps only in a sub-journal," Levitt said.

Chen Yuanguang replied, "I have an idea. I will apply to the school later to refine it."

Because he didn't have a lab available before, Chen Yuanguang's paper was entirely based on computational simulation and lacked the experimental verification part.

Levitt asked, "Did you complete this paper independently, or did you collaborate with others?"

Just from their conversation, Levitt knew that the main contributor to this paper was definitely Chen Yuanguang, because he explained the ideas and design within it very clearly.

Chen Yuanguang said, "Just me."

Levitt said, "Then when it's published in Nature, if you don't mind, you can list me as the second author. That way, it will definitely be published in Nature."