Miloš Musil was awarded the Joseph Fourier Prize for his research in bioinformatics

Miloš Musil, a doctoral student at the Faculty of Information Technology of BUT, has been awarded the prestigious Joseph Fourier Prize today. He won the prize for the second place and a special award of the IT4Innovations supercomputer centre for his research in bioinformatics.

The expert jury awarded the prize to Miloš Musil for three of his projects. The first one is PredictSNP2, a web service helping physicians to estimate the effect of nucleotide mutations on human health. "If physicians don't know the nature of the mutation causing a disease, they can sequence the patient's entire genome and compare it to a reference genome created from samples taken from the general population. They will see how the patient's DNA deviates from the reference genome and they can enter these deviations to our tool which will estimate whether or not the mutations are harmful. The aim is to help experts to select mutations which need to be dealt with first," explains Miloš Musil.

The second project is called HotSpot Wizard. This tool helps experts to select potentially interesting parts in proteins whose mutation may improve properties of proteins, such as their stability or activity. "Laboratories wouldn't have to test tens of thousands of mutations, which is very time-consuming and costly. The tool helps select positions in proteins suitable for further experiments," says Miloš Musil.

Doctoral student Miloš Musil received his award at the French Embassy | Photo: Joseph Fourier Prize archive

The jury awarded the prize to Miloš also for his participation in the FireProt project. FireProt is a tool which can utilise two different methods to automatically design a set of mutations which can stabilise a protein for its further use under demanding conditions, e.g. in the industry.

Awarding by Nobel laureates

The official awarding took place on 20 June 2018 at the Buquoy Palace, the seat of the French Embassy. The winners received their awards directly from Nobel Prize winners Jean-Marie Lehn, Jean-Pierre Sauvage and Serge Haroche.

Joseph Fourier Prize is a scientific competition aiming at rewarding the best students who significantly contribute to the area of informatics and information technology focusing on design and practical use of computer algorithms and methods, simulations and modelling and manipulation of large volumes of data.

Last year, another Joseph Fourier Prize went to the Faculty of Information Technology of BUT. Doctoral student Jakub Sochor won it for his automatic traffic analysis.