Self-introduction: Yuki Koyanagi

Hi everyone. My name is Yuki Koyanagi and I am a visiting student at iTHEMS. My research interest is the study of protein structures, specifically how we can predict local structures of a protein from its sequence of amino acid residues. Knowing the structure of protein is important, because we know that a protein's function is highly dependent on its structure. A protein is made up of lots of amino acids connected like a chain, which then folds itself to a three-dimensional structure. One of the important factors that determine the folding is hydrogen bonds, that form at different places along the chain. I am looking into how we can predict the structure around each hydrogen bond. Another related question is finding out how many different hydrogen bond structures are possible for a given sequence of amino acids.
I am a mathematician and work at a mathematics research centre, the interdisciplinary environment at iTHEMS is something new to me. I am very excited about the opportunity of meeting people from different fields with different backgrounds.