Khrystyna Fediv and Iryna Yatskiv, fourth-year students of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, are undergoing a three-month internship at the Institute of Physiology at the University of Tübingen. This is one of the oldest German universities known for its achievements in biology and medicine. The girls work in the neurophysiology laboratory, where they study the role of microglia in two different conditions: first, halogenated narcotics poisoning, which causes the development of pathogenic tumors and inflammation in the brain, and second, a gain-of-function (GoF) mutation in the KCNA2 gene, which encodes the Kv1.2 potassium channel. They master modern methods of fluorescence microscopy and digital image analysis. This area of research complements the work of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology of our university, which studies the relationship between eating disorders and inflammatory processes in the brain.
This is not the first internship of PNU biochemistry students at the University of Tübingen. Last year, bachelor Myroslava Polozhentseva and master student Daria Dodon worked on a project to study the impact of Alzheimer’s disease on gene expression in the mouse brain. The girls used a modern bioinformatics approach to analyze the results of RNA sequencing to determine which metabolic pathways were activated or inhibited based on data for a large number of individual genes.
These internships have been made possible through a collaboration between our University and the University of Tübingen as part of an educational project funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).