About
Akhona was born and bred in a small town called Stutterheim in the Eastern Cape (a province in South Africa). She holds a Master’s degree (cum laude) in Biochemistry with specialisation in Plant metabolomics. Her MSc project focused on plant natural product research, specifically the chemical exploration of cannabis varieties and their potential medicinal properties using computational metabolomics strategies. Her Cannabolomics research or dissertation, under the supervision of Dr F. Tugizimana, Prof N.E Madala and Prof JJJ van der Hooft, was titled “Metabolomics studies, involving computational methods, to investigate the chemical space and biochemistry of different cultivars of homegrown cannabis.” This sparked her interest in the exploration of medicinal plants thus in her new Ph.D. study, which utilizes a variety of computational metabolomics strategies, she focuses on studying the effect of plant-promoting rhizobacteria on the production of bioactive natural products in medicinal plants that are indigenous to South Africa.
Research interests
- Computational tools
- Natural products
- Medicinal plants
- Plant promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR)
