Artificial Intelligence identifies small molecules

The Thuringian Research Award has been honouring top scientific achievements since 1995. Image: Jens Meyer (University of Jena) - A bioinformatics research team from Friedrich Schiller University Jena has won the 2022 Thuringian Research Prize for applied research, Thuringia's Science Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee announced today (06 April) in a video presentation. The prize of 12,500 euros, awarded for the development of machine learning methods for identifying small molecules, went to the team comprising Prof. Sebastian Böcker, Dr Kai Dührkop, Dr Markus Fleischauer, Dr Marcus Ludwig and Martin Hoffmann. Sebastian Böcker, Chair of Bioinformatics, 3rd from left, holds the Thuringian Research Award 2022 in his hands. Dr Markus Fleischauer, left, Dr Kai Dührkop, 2nd from left, Dr Marcus Ludwig, 4th from left, and doctoral candidate Martin Hoffmann, right, were also honoured. However, identifying new active substances from nature and making them usable is time-consuming, costly and labour-intensive. " In addition, we often don't even know which unknown molecular structures we're actually looking for, " says Böcker.