Kgalaletso Othibeng
PhD candidate

I am a first year PhD candidate in Biochemistry at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa), born and raised in Mafikeng (South Africa). I was first introduced to the field of metabolomics in my BSc Honours studies (in 2020) during which I did a short research project titled ‘Combined machine learning and pathway analysis to unravel metabolic circuits in sap extracts from maize plants treated with rhizobacteria, under drought conditions’ – a contribution to ongoing efforts to generate knowledge about the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying biostimulant (PGPR) action. After the completion of the BSc Honours, I embarked on a research-based MSc in Biochemistry and worked on a computational metabolomics project titled ‘Metabolomics studies, exploring and applying e-infrastructures, to unravel biochemical events defining the effects of biostimulants on crop plants’, under the supervision of Dr Fidele Tugizimana. The main aim of this metabolomics work was to explore and apply emerging 4IR-inspired computational and bioinformatics tools and strategies to predictively investigate the response to biostimulant treatment in maize as well as to profile the seed metabolomes of different wheat cultivars. Thus, my interest in computational tools and workflows was sparked during my MSc studies where I got to explore and apply various novel computational and machine learning-driven bioinformatics tools for metabolite annotation, data visualization and interpretation. Some of the computational tools and workflows I applied include classical and feature-based molecular networking, ion identity molecular networking (IIMN), MS2LDA, Spec2Vec, network annotation propagation (NAP) and MolNetEnhancer. This MSc work resulted in 3 publications – 2 research articles and one book chapter. With this nurtured interest in computational metabolomics, I have recently registered for a PhD in Biochemistry, with ambitions to not only explore and apply computational tools and strategies, but to contribute to the development of these metabolome mining tools. Under the guidance of Prof. Justin van der Hooft and Dr Fidele Tugizimana, my proposed research project field is “the use of computational metabolomics to investigate the metabolism of medicinal plants in South Africa”. Through this work, I hope to contribute towards the developments of tools to interrogate plant metabolism in integrated manner, to investigate the chemistries and biology of selected medicinal plants in South Africa, generating novel knowledge and insights on (plant-derived) natural products biosynthetic pathways and networks, and the discovery of novel metabolites with beneficial activities.

- Biochemistry

- Natural products

- Molecular networking, bioinformatics tools

- Plant metabolomics