Polina Reshetova

Introduction

Polina studied molecular biology at the Novosibirsk State University, Russia, where she received MS degree in 2004. From 2004 to 2009 Polina worked as a researcher in the Group of Pharmacogenomics at the Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine, Novosibirsk, Russia, where she focused on microarray data analysis. In 2009 she joined the Center for Human and Clinical Genetics at Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands, to work on microarray data analysis for the HeartRepair European research consortium. In July 2010 Polina started PhD project "Biologically Relevant Analysis of Metabolomics data" at the Biosystems Data Analysis Group.

PhD Project

The main question of this project is how to encode the information present in a knowledge base in such a way that it can be used in explorative metabolomics data analysis to improve the interpretation of the results. The main interest of this project is polyphenols and their degradation pathways. Polyphenols are a group of plant metabolites present in every day diet of all people and have a role in the prevention of prominent diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, malignancies, neurodegenerative disorders and metabolic syndrome. Their bioavailability however depends strongly on the variety of gut bacteria that break down the large aromatic molecules into smaller and simpler phenolics that are absorbed into the human body. We will explore known metabolic network information, store and treat it in a way it can be used directly in the multivariate statistical analysis of metabolomics experiments.