Professor Warshel's research covers a wide range of problems in modern biophysical chemistry. He and his coworkers have pioneered several of the most effective models for computer simulations of biological molecule. The studies of Warshel's group include the following:

Our early works paved the way for quantitative theoretical studies of enzymatic reactions. These works introduced the Hybrid - Quantum Mechanical / Molecular Mechanics (QM/MM) method and a microscopic approach for studies of electrostatic effects in proteins. The QM/MM and related approaches allow other scientists to study the energetics and dynamics of enzymatic reactions. Our group continues to push the frontiers of the field developing new approaches, studying complex effects such as quantum tunneling and entropic effects in enzymes and exploring the action of enzymes of special biological importance.

The first molecular dynamics simulation of a biological process was reported by Warshel in a 1976 study of the primary event of the vision process. Warshel's group continues to be very active in this field, studying ultrafast reactions such as the primary processes in the photosynthetic reaction center (where their theoretical study was the first to elucidate the correct electron transfer mechanisms) and the photoisomerization reaction in bacteriorhodopsin.

In order to understand enzymatic reactions it is crucial to have a quantitative picture of the corresponding reference reactions in solutions. The realization of this fact led Warshel's group to spend a major effort on studying the energetics and dynamics of chemical processes in solution. These studies include the use and development of various QM/MM approaches and related models for quantitative simulations of chemical reactions in solutions.

Our early works involved the development of the first physically consistent models for studies of electrostatic energies in proteins. The use of these models led to the current realization that electrostatic energies provide the best way of correlating structure and function of biological molecules. The use of calculations of electrostatic energies in analyzing a wide range of biological problems is a major part of the research effort of Warshel's group. This includes evaluation of pKa's and redox potentials of proteins, drug designs, and studies of protein-protein interactions.

The simplified model for protein folding introduced by Levitt and Warshel is now the method of choice in most studies of protein folding. Our recent effort in this direction has focused on developing innovative ways of using the results of the simplified model in the evaluation of the corrresponding free energies of more detailed all-atom models

Prof. Jenn-Kang Hwang is interested in the structure-dynamics- evolution relationship in proteins.

Protein average thermal fluctuations are shown be derived directly from protein structures without assuming any mechanical models. A number of protein structural profiles such as residue packing, i.e. the weighted contact  number (WCN), protein centroid distance, thermal fluctuation profile or smoothed solvent accessible surface profiles are similar to a smoothed version of sequence conservation profile in varying degrees. This is surprising, since the WCN profile is derived from a single protein structure, while the sequence conservation profile is derived from multiple sequence alignment of a group of homologous sequences. This suggests that a single protein structure contains evolutionary information that was previously derived only from multiple sequences. We are also interested in the following topics such as knotted proteins, protein subcellular localization, protein structure prediction, disulfide proteins, molecular simulation and any topics that are intellectually interesting.

Laboratory of Computational Health Informatics and Omics (Computational Omics Lab) aims to integrate interdisciplinary approaches to providing insights into important biological problems and the industrial value of clinical applications. We also enable the development of new biological resources with broad applications, especially in microRNAs, protein modifications and gene regulation.

Recently, high-throughput sequencing and Brain-Computer interface technology become our major focus both in scientific research and in clinical applications. The ultimate goal in our lab is to get a comprehensive view of complex disease-gene-drug relationships - from the molecular level to biological functions of drug targets and response. Reveal previously unseen patterns across heterogeneous and big datasets to predict targets and biomarkers. Our team will also define a rigorous data-mining program and integrate the data using machine learning or other deep analytical approaches.

Dr. Huang’s group developed a miRNA database, miRTarBase, which is an internationally recognized repository for collecting experimental miRNA-Target interactions (MTIs). miRTarBase 2018 update contains 422,517 curated miRNA-target interactions between 4,076 miRNAs and 23,054 target genes, collected from over 8,510 articles. Generally, the collected MTIs have been validated experimentally by 3’UTR-reporter assay, western blotting, microarray analysis and by next-generation sequencing experiments. The users are majorly from the China, United States and India. The database has earned more than 1500 citations. The database is continuously maintained and now broadly utilized and referred in life science and medical research field.

DNA level, RNA level, miRNA and small RNA, Next-generation sequencing, Third-generation sequencing, Single cell analysis and sequencing, Omics, Artificial Intelligence, Algorithm, Parallel Computation, Machine Learning, Drug design, Drug development, Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)

Dr. Lee’s group research interests include bioinformatics, genomics and proteomics, network biology, data mining in Omics science, shallow and deep learning, database design and software development. His research team currently specialize in gene promoters and transcriptional regulations, circular RNA regulation, microbiota and functional analyses, protein post-translational modifications (PTMs), protein kinases and signaling pathway, protein ubiquitylation and E3 ligases regulations, protein glycosylation and glycosyl-structure identification, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), multidrug-resistant pathogens diagnosis, and drug repurposing. His longer-term research goals are focusing on the integration of Bioinformatics and Omics science to address emerging biological and clinical questions for precision medicine.

Protein PTMs are one of the most important mechanisms of eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells, which involve the attachment of chemical groups to amino acid side chains of proteins. A variety of PTMs have been reported to play crucial roles in diversely cellular processes that modulate a protein’s function, physicochemical properties, conformation, stability, and molecular interactions in response to developmental signals or environmental stimuli. Owing to the labile nature and low abundance of in vivo PTM sites, further research is needed to clarify the characteristics of PTMs and its mechanisms. Therefore, there is an urgent requirement in bioinformatics for a practical approach to investigate the potential substrate motifs of protein PTM sites to be designed. Our research group have developed over 20 tools for prediction of PTM sites based on sequence and structral information.

dbPTM in 2019: exploring disease association and cross-talk of post-translational modifications

The dbPTM has been maintained for over ten years with the aim to provide functional and structural analyses for post-translational modifications (PTMs). In this update, dbPTM not only integrates more experimentally validated PTMs from available databases and through manual curation of literature but also provides PTM-disease associations based on non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs). The high-throughput deep sequencing technology has led to a surge in the data generated through analysis of association between SNPs and diseases, both in terms of growth amount and scope. This update thus integrated disease-associated nsSNPs from dbSNP based on Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS). (http://dbptm.mbc.nctu.edu.tw)

dbAMP: an integrated resource for exploring antimicrobial peptides with functional activities and physicochemical properties on transcriptome and proteome data

An increasing interest therefore was motivated to explore natural AMPs that enable the development of new antibiotics. With the potential of AMPs being as new drugs for multidrug-resistant pathogens, we were thus motivated to develop a database by accumulating comprehensive AMPs from public domain and manually curating literature. Currently in dbAMP there are 12,389 unique entries, including 4271 experimentally verified AMPs and 8118 putative AMPs along with their functional activities, supported by 1924 research articles. The advent of high-throughput biotechnologies, such as mass spectrometry and next-generation sequencing, has led us to further expand dbAMP as a database-assisted platform for providing comprehensively functional and physicochemical analyses for AMPs based on the large-scale transcriptome and proteome data. Significant improvements available in dbAMP include the information of AMP-protein interactions, antimicrobial potency analysis for “cryptic” region detection, annotations of AMP target species, as well as AMP detection on transcriptome and proteome datasets.
(http://csb.cse.yzu.edu.tw/dbAMP)

Prof. HIRAO's research group is interested in computationally deriving general principles of chemical reactions and molecular interactions occurring in nature and labs, and also in rationally designing therapeutic and other types of functional molecules with experimentalists.

Specific research themes of the group include the following:

1. Development of intuitively appealing methods for analyzing chemical reactivities and molecular interactions: reactive hybrid orbital (RHO); reactive bond orbital (RBO); energy decomposition analysis; reconstruction of molecular wave functions for chemistry purposes.

2. Development of unique molecular mechanics (MM) force-field parametrization schemes: partial hessian fitting (PHF); full hessian fitting (FHF); internal hessian fitting (IHF); geometry amendment (Katachi); genetic and other optimization algorithms; machine learning; Python, etc.

3. Enzyme catalysis: metalloenzymes, proteases, etc.; density functional theory (DFT); ab initio quantum chemistry; quantum mechanics and molecular mechanics (QM/MM); ONIOM; molecular dynamics (MD); catalytic cycles; QM/MM energy decomposition; free energy calculations.

4. Computational drug design: discovery of potent and selective enzyme inhibitors; docking simulation; analysis of protein-ligand interactions; drug metabolism; mechanism-based inactivation (MBI); central nervous system (CNS); β-lactam antibiotics; DNA-targeting anti-cancer drugs.

5. Bioinorganic chemistry: heme enzymes (cytochrome P450, etc.); nonheme enzymes (myo-inositol oxygenase (MIOX), hydroxyethylphosphonate dioxygenase (HEPD), etc.); high-spin reactivity of iron(IV)-oxo intermediates; metal-oxo complexes bearing synthetic ligands; C–H bond activation.

6. Homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis: transition-metal catalysis; photocatalytic reactions; main group chemistry; organocatalysis; reactions catalyzed by heterogeneous systems such as nanoparticles and metal–organic frameworks (MOFs); machine learning; QM/QM hybridization.

7. Porous materials: MOFs; pillararenes; zeolites; molecular organic cages; porous organic frameworks (POFs); adsorption, separation, purification, catalytic activation, and sensing of guest molecules; QM/MM, MM, and plane-wave density functional theory (DFT) treatments of porous systems.

Research in Dr. Cheng's group involves the use of combined theoretical and experimental methods to investigate enzymatic and organic reactions.

Computational and experimental study of biological & chemical catalysis

Dr. Zhu’s current research focuses on RNA-protein interactions, mechanism of RNA/DNA interference and the development of automated path searching methods and other enhanced sampling techniques.

Development of enhanced sampling techniques
such as automated path searching methods and investigation of functional dynamics for biological systems

The group's research currently focus on the development of enhanced sampling techniques such as automated path searching methods and the biological applications.

1. To develop the method to locate multiple transition pathway (High-energy parallel cascade selection, HePaCS) and to optimize the multiple transition paths (multiple Traveling-salesman based Automated Path Searching, mTAPS);
2. To investigate the molecular mechanism of RNA/DNA interference with argonaute.
3. To investigate the molecular mechanism of small-molecule induced homo/hetero-dimerization effects of MEK1 kinase.