New master in NMR Øyvind Ødegård recently submitted his master thesis entitled “Non-conserved C-terminal regions in the histone recognition module CW, determines specificity, stability and affinity towards monomethylated histone tails”, supervised at The Department of Chemistry (UiB) and The Department of Molecular Biology (UiB).

The interest for these C-terminal histone regions stem from their roles as sensors for epigenetic markers. In short, the thesis was an attempt to understand the structural and dynamical basis of the epigenetic code. This is an important frontier in molecular biology. Earlier work on the CW domains suggested that the rather mobile C-terminal domain was involved in binding and recognition of such histone tails. Ødegård approached this question using protein relaxation studies followed by a model-free analysis, and where able to strengthen this hypothesis significantly.