Michael Wittenberg

Michael has an undergraduate in Applied statistics in addition to Мolecular biology and continued the latter on for a master's all at the university of cape town (UCT), with a focus on metabolomics and microbiome research. Throughout this time, he also worked as a technician at UCT assisting the small molecules unit in running and analysing GC-MS samples leading to hands on experience with this methodology. Towards the end of his master's, he also he also participated in an MSCA-RISE exchange under the RESIST project where he acquired further metabolomics skills at the Max Planck Institute for molecular plant physiology in Potsdam-Golm. Through this exchange he became acquainted with CPSBB (the coordinator of RESIST) and subsequently joined CPSBB as a PhD student following his master's. At CPSBB, Michael pursues a PhD focused on agronomic and metabolomic traits under salt stress in tomato and pepper GWAS populations, whilst also operating the GC-MS unit at CPSBB.

Leveraging these skills, Michael analyses CropPrime samples on the GC-MS platform and performs data analysis at CPSBB. However, he lacks the same practical knowledge for LC-MS and so was sent to University of Johannesburg for nearly three months to improve his skillset and run CropPrime samples on their LC-MS. The University of Johannesburg contains multiple centres of excellence that hosts numerous LC-MS instruments, thus providing depth of knowledge in this research area. By running the CropPrime samples here, Michael will receive hands on training to operate and maintain the instruments in addition to learning more advanced computational methods of metabolite annotation. These skillsets will add value to future LC-MS datasets generated back at CPSBB. Reciprocally, Michael's six years of experience on GC-MS will contribute to skills building at the University of Johannesburg to improve their GC-MS capacity.