Programming never appealed to Roman until he began studying at FIT. After an intensive first year, he started using programming to automate and simplify almost everything. However, as he discovered during his work as a programmer at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (ÚOCHB) in Tomáš Pluskal's group, natural processes are so complex that not only can they not be simplified, but most of the time, they can't even be fully understood. That's why, at present, he is working on developing artificial intelligence algorithms to help with this.
Tomáš Pluskal's group studies plant biochemistry, an area about which we still know very little. In fact, we don't even know most of the molecules contained in plants, even though many medicines are directly derived from them. Roman began working at ÚOCHB while studying at FIT as a programmer for the scientific software MZmine 3, which is used for processing mass spectrometry data. This data contains information about the molecular composition of organic samples (e.g., plants) and helps study the corresponding biological processes. MZmine 3 is developed and used by experts worldwide, and recently the software was published in the prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology. However, mass spectrometry data contains so much information that we are still unable to decode more than 90% of it. Roman is currently completing his master's degree at FIT in the 2022/2023 academic year with a thesis aimed at pushing these limits using artificial intelligence.
His bachelor’s thesis, Prediction of Terpene Biosynthesis Using Machine Learning, was written at the Department of Applied Mathematics in collaboration with ÚOCHB, also under the supervision of Tomáš Pluskal. He applied machine learning algorithms to understand the biosynthesis of pharmaceutically active molecules, terpenes. For this work, he received the Via Chimica Award in 2022.
"Plants are much better chemists than humans and can synthesize substances that humans cannot produce at all. So understanding the biological processes of synthesis has the potential to completely change the approach to drug production."
Roman plans to pursue a Ph.D. at ÚOCHB and CIIRC, where he will continue to transform the approach to biochemistry using artificial intelligence.