Doha: Qatar University’s (QU) Thirteen Biomedical Science students presented eight different research projects recently online in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. These presentations were the fruitful conclusion of four years of undergraduate studies.
Three students, Asmaa Allouch, Tara Fathi, and Asma Hassan, conducted two different studies focusing on the effect of different substances against human breast and colorectal cancer cells under the supervision of Professor Ahmad Malki, the associate dean of academic affairs at Health Sciences College.
The studies were in collaboration with Professor Ala Eddin Moustafa from the College of Medicine and Professor Ashraf Khalil from the College of Pharmacy. Another study was supervised by Dr. Hatem Zayed, the associate professor at Biomedical Sciences, focusing on signalling cascades of multiple myeloma cells treated with pristimerin.
This study was conducted by the two students, Rehab Elkardawy and Heba Almaghrbi, using a bioinformatics approach and accepted for publication in a peer-review scientific journal. This study was in collaboration with the translation research institute at HMC and the College of Pharmacy at QU, and the School of BioSciences and Technology in India.
A study titled “profile of oxidative stress genes in response to obesity treatment” was supervised by Dr. Nasser Rizk, the associate professor of Biomedical Science at Qatar University. This study was conducted by the two students, Amira Mohemd and Huda Farah, and found using mice models that decreasing oxidative stress damage in skeletal muscles through the NrF2 pathway would be a potential anti-obesity drug.
Another project was under the supervision of Dr. Nahla Omer, the Research Associate of the Biomedical Research Center. In this project, the two students, Hanin Nizar and Noora Shams compared different methods to investigate the in vitro activity of colistin against various gram-negative bacilli. Using the Zebrafish model in the research field was the dominant feature of three different studies. The first one was supervised by Dr. Huseyin Yalcin, the assistant professor at the biomedical research center, and conducted by the two students, Nabila Moulana and Sara Suleiman, to develop a vasoconstriction hypertension model in Zebrafish.
The second one was supervised by Dr. Gheyath Nasrallah, the associate professor of Immunology at Qatar University, where the student, Aldana Al-Dosari, evaluated the toxicity of AEO surfactant. The third study was supervised by Dr. Maha Alasmakh to evaluate the toxic effect of water-pipe smoking on the embryonic development of zebrafish. This study was conducted by Shima Aladawi.
