Damian Rafal Plichta

This study identifies and characterizes the IsmB enzyme, which catalyzes a key step in coprostanol formation by the human gut microbiome, and links its presence to lower serum cholesterol levels.

CAZyLingua uses protein language models to annotate carbohydrate-active enzymes in metagenomic data, outperforming traditional methods and revealing new annotations in disease-related datasets.

The paper investigates how industrialization affects microbial and physiological traits in the human gut across diverse populations, finding homogenized microbiomes, reduced diversity, and impaired disease prediction accuracy in less industrialized groups.

The paper develops PHAMB, a method to bin viral genomes from bulk metagenomics data, and applies it to the HMP2 cohort to recover viral genomes and explore viral-host interactions.