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Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.
–Thomas Carlyle
Highly valued as a tasty, low-calorie, and nutrient-rich
food staple, mushrooms have been consumed for millennia by people
around the world. The varieties of mushrooms eaten today are grown on
farms or collected in the wild. In addition to their value as food,
mushrooms have been used for medicinal purposes for centuries,
especially in China, and since the 1960s, scientists in other nations
have become increasingly interested in studying extracts from mushrooms
to assess their antibacterial, antifungal, and potentially even
anticancer compounds.
Liberata Mwita, a RISE-SABINA student working toward
her master’s degree at the University of Dar es Salaam, is using the
modern techniques of biotechnology and bioinformatics to identify
bioactive compounds for mushrooms and enhance traditional uses.
Liberata is working on Coprinus, a genus of wild mushroom that has been
domesticated for its food value and is also known to have bioactive
compounds. While it is widely used as food, it hasn’t been used for
medicinal purposes, despite its potential applications. Not
surprisingly, the genome of the Tanzanian strain of Coprinus has not
yet been sequenced, so Liberata’s research will be an immediately
useful addition to current biomedical knowledge.
Tall and well-spoken, with a brilliant smile, Liberata
Mwita comes only recently to her place in bioinformatics. As a little
girl, the eldest of four children born to Tanzanian medical doctors in
Lindi, Tanzania, she urgently wanted to be a pilot. Liberata credits
her parents with inspiring and gradually guiding her toward her
standout academic work in science. She also speaks highly of her
advisors, Dr. Sylvester Lyantagaye at the University of Dar es Salaam
and Professor Oleg Reva at the University of Pretoria, for taking her
under their wings and giving generously of their time.
At the beginning of her master’s studies, Liberata was
given the opportunity to go to South Africa from February to November
2010. She began with a seven-week crash course in bioinformatics at the
Center for Computing at Cape Biotech, in Cape Town, and then moved on
to the University of Pretoria to work with the state-of-the-art
instrumentation and software available there. (She used the same kinds
of instruments used by pharmaceutical companies, which is extremely
expensive and unavailable to researchers at her home university in Dar
es Salaam.
Conventional drug discovery and development can be a
ten-year process, from selecting materials to study through producing
and clinically testing an end product, but recent developments in
biotechnology and computer science, like those Liberata is learning,
enable modern scientists to significantly reduce that timeline. When we
visited Liberata at UDSM in June 2011, she had wrapped up her work from
South Africa and begun cultivating Coprinus cinereus to verify her
computational work. The amount of bioinformatics research taking place
in Tanzania is small and concentrated, so the addition of Liberata’s
expertise guarantees a meaningful impact on her field.
After Liberata has earned her master’s degree in
biotechnology (she hopes to finish by January 2012), she will apply to
join the university staff. This will require a formal application
process, including the approval of the government of Tanzania, which
has a say in university appointments. With her excellent training and
her unique set of skills, Liberata Mwita has every hope of becoming an
asset to the higher education community in Tanzania.
Story: Loris Mulcare (Science Initiative
Group
(SIG) Blog, October 2011)
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Ms Liberata Mwita
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