I am Danila Iakovlev, PhD in biochemistry. I work as a computational chemist in drug discovery team at Biocad, St. Petersburg. My fields of scientific interest are:
- Protein structures;
- Drug Discovery;
- Protein dynamics;
- Nature of biocatalysis;
- Visualization of biomolecules and, generally, scientific information representation and design.
Also I like making strange electronic music (Soundcloud), cooking and snowboarding.
My postgraduate work is about conformational dymanics of DNA repair proteins. I concider BER pathway participants, which repair U:G and T:G mismathces. Our team has already described two of these enzymes: human MBD4 and SMUG1.
MBD4 is a critical player in DNA demethylation process, it removes 5-methyluracil derivatives in special CpG domains. We investigated its non-stationary kinetics and published results in Acta Naturae.
SMUG1 is a bit simpler guy: it just removes uracil and 5-hydroxymethyluracil from DNA. But there is still no crystal structure of human SMUG1. We made a model structure of it and studied its kinetics. Results were also represented at FEBS Congress 2018 (poster).
As a member of drug discovery team, I conduct computational experiments and molecular modelling in support of computer aided drug discovery. I am responsible for product strategy, formulating and maintaining medicinal chemistry hypotheses.
As a result of Lifecode–2017 hackathon we made a toy investigation (slides, poster) for amino acid distribution within a protein core and possibility to spatially recognise domains. Works not very well, but domains are usually detected.