Kuo-Chen Chou
Kuo-Chen Chou was a Chinese-American biophysicist and bioinformatician who founded the Gordon Life Science Institute, a non-profit research organization in Boston, Massachusetts. Among other contributions, he developed pseudo amino acid composition, used in computational biology for proteomics analysis and pseudo K-tuple nucleotide composition for genome analysis. He is the father of James Chou.
In 2020, it was revealed that Chou had been removed from the editorial board of the Journal of Theoretical Biology and banned as a reviewer for the journal Bioinformatics for repeatedly manipulating the peer-review process to gain citations to his own papers. The editors of the Journal of Theoretical Biology referred to it as "scientific misconduct of the highest order".
Research
In 1972, he and his co-workers, by taking into account the spatial factor and force field factor between the enzyme and its substrate, reported that the upper limit of diffusion-controlled reaction of enzyme or diffusion limited enzyme is one order of magnitude higher than the conventional estimation, and can be used to elucidate some surprisingly high reaction rates in molecular biology.In 1977, he predicted the existence of low-frequency phonons in proteins, followed by developing the theory of low-frequency collective motion in proteins and DNA after it had been confirmed by Raman spectroscopy.
In 1995, he proposed and proved a theorem on invariance for addressing some problems often encountered in bioinformatics and cheminformatics.
In 1996, he proposed the distorted key theory for guiding how to design peptide drugs.
In 1997, he proposed the wenxiang diagram, a way to show residue properties on an alpha helix similar to a helical wheel.
In 2011, he proposed the 5-steps rule, that has been used for proteome and genome analyses as well as predicting posttranslational modification sites in protein, RNA, and DNA sequences.
As of December 2019, Chou had published over 720 scientific papers in enzyme kinetics, graphical methods in biology, protein structure prediction and function, low-frequency collective motion in macromolecules, proteome and genome analyses, and identification of posttranslational modification sites in biological sequences.
Editorial roles
Chou served multiple editorial roles, including Editor-in-Chief of Bioinformatics Journal">Bioinformatics (journal)">Bioinformatics Journal, and as a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, and The Open Biochemistry Journal, among others.He was an Honorary Editor for The Open Bioinformatics Journal and Associate Editor for Medicinal Chemistry.