Kgalaletso Othibeng

About

Ms. Kgalaletso Othibeng, born and raised in Mafikeng (North West), holds various academic degrees namely, a BSc in Life and Environmental Sciences: Physiology and Biochemistry (cum laude), an Honours in Biochemistry (cum laude) and a Masters in Biochemistry (magna cum laude). Ms. Othibeng is a research assistant in the Biochemistry department and an active member of the Metabolomics Society South Africa (MSA) where she is also part of the MSA training and conferencing committee.

She is currently a PhD Biochemistry candidate at the University of Johannesburg under the supervision of Dr. Fidele Tugizimana (UJ), Prof. Justin van der Hooft (WUR) and Dr. Zamani Cele (CSIR). Ms. Othibeng’s current doctoral research project is a multidisciplinary research work – computational metabolomics – exploring and applying emerging computational tools and strategies to investigate the chemistries and underlying biochemistry of selected medicinal plants in South Africa, providing novel comprehensive metabolic landscapes of the plants. The computational tools and workflows that will be applied include classical and feature-based molecular networking, ion identity molecular networking (IIMN), MS2LDA, Spec2Vec, network annotation propagation (NAP), MS2Query, FERMO and SpecXplore amongst many others. As such this innovative research project aims to generate novel knowledge and actionable insights on (natural products) biosynthetic pathways and networks (in the selected medicinal plants), and discovering novel natural products with medicinal, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical benefits. To date Ms. Othibeng has published 1 book chapter (Humana, NY) and 2 research articles (from her Honors and Masters work) in peer-reviewed international scientific journals and has other publications in preparation.