Tromso visit

Last week, Prof. Matuszyńska visited Tromsø, home to the world’s northernmost university, UiT- The Arctic University of Norway. She served as an opponent in the PhD committee of Roland Sauter, a PhD student in Ines Heiland group. Sauter’s thesis focused on genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) and addressed several notable gaps in their current format, such as assumption of static cofactor concentrations, or need for a cellular objective function when only enzymeabundance information is available. Roland has succesfully defendet his approaches presenting a numerical method that introduced NAD concentration constraints into the existing GEM (MitoCore), which created condition-specific models for a human cell line [1] and a graph‑based algorithm (GEMCAT) that represents the metabolic network as a directed graph that uses PageRank to weight each reaction and propagate tehse weight as scores across the network [2].

It was a truly unique experience: witnessing the breathtaking northern lights, meeting new people in Ines’ group, and experiencing firsthand Norwegian PhD defense.

[1] Sauter R, Sharma S, Heiland I. Accounting for NAD Concentrations in Genome-Scale Metabolic Models Captures Important Metabolic Alterations in NAD-Depleted Systems. Biomolecules. 2024; 14(5):602. https://doi.org/10.3390/biom14050602 [2] Sharma S, Sauter R, Hotze M, Prowatke AMP, Niere M, Kipura T, Egger AS, Thedieck K, Kwiatkowski M, Ziegler M, Heiland I. GEMCAT-a new algorithm for gene expression-based prediction of metabolic alterations. NAR Genom Bioinform. 2025 Jan 31;7(1):lqaf003. doi: 10.1093/nargab/lqaf003. PMID: 39897103; PMCID: PMC11783570.