Research area:

Environmental Toxicology

Type of scientist:

Molecular biologist (Proteomics)

Host Organisation & country:

Africa City of Technology (ACT), Sudan

Summary

In Sub-Saharan Africa, harsh economic situations coupled with continuous stresses brought by climate change have affected the livelihood of rural communities and forced them to depend mainly on indigenous tree plants such as Baobab plant (Adansonia digitata L.) as a source of food and income. Through our research we aim to investigate proteins in Baobab plant to gain insight on their heat resistance capacity. This could lead to further development of other seeded that can survive in Sub-Saharan Africa climate.

Grantee Description

I am a researcher in Africa City Technology, which is a research institute located in Khartoum, Sudan. I obtain my PhD from Department of biological Sciences, University of Bergen, Norway. My PhD work was centred around effects of environmental pollutants on adrenal hormone production. My work focused on analysing the metabolome of human adrenocarcinoma H295R cells using LC-MS/MS.

I worked as a research assistance in several European laboratories gaining a wide experience in metabolomics, proteomics and transcriptomics. I aspire to build a proteomics platform in Sudan, which would provide Sudanese scientists with cutting-edge tools, that would enhance African research quality.

Project: Coupling of proteomics and transcriptomics approaches to reveal the genes responsible for Baobab plant (Adansonia digitata L.) tolerance to high temperature.

Our overall-objective is to couple the proteomics and transcriptomics approaches to unravel genes responsible for Adansonia digitata L adaptation to high temperature, by generating proteomic reference maps from the 4-weeks seedlings under control and stress conditions, the subsequent generation of MS-fingerprint, quantifying mRNA relative abundance, and establish a high accuracy Adansonia digitata full-length gene and proteins/peptides sequences repository and identify genes and proteins/peptides related to adaptation against increased temperature.