Biological code of knots – identification of knotted patterns in biomolecules via AI approach

This project is concerned with a few seemingly unrelated research areas: proteins, knots, and artificial intelligence. Proteins are basic building blocks of living organisms, which play many important biological roles. There are 21 amino acids, which are fundamental building blocks of proteins. Each protein is a chain made of a few hundred, or even a few thousand amino acids. In appropriate conditions such a chain attains some particular three-dimensional shape, which is called the native structure; formation of such a shape is necessary so that a protein can perform its biological function. It follows that a sequence of amino acids in a protein (which can be regarded as a long word made of 21 types of letters) must somehow determine the threedimensional native structure of the protein, as well as its function. Understanding of such relations is one of the aims of structural biology; as it turns out, it is also one of the greatest challenges of modern science.