Dr AHMED TAWFIKE

BIOGRAPHY

Ahmed started to explore plant-derived natural products when he graduated in Pharmacy. During his MSc, he examined plants used in traditional medicine looking for new therapeutic agents. During his PhD, he searched for other natural sources of more chemical and biological diversity, such as microorganisms. Using metabolomics and de-replication tools, Ahmed was able to compare the metabolic fingerprints of different fungal and/or bacterial extracts to choose the optimum growth condition to produce the highest yield of bioactive metabolites. One of his interests is using molecular networking of MS-MS fragmentation data to de-replicate and discover new nutraceuticals from terrestrial or marine sources. Recently, Ahmed explored a new method of fusing MS and NMR data in chemometric analysis to correlate the metabolites, highly contributed in the bioactivity, to their corresponding chemical shift, which helped to elucidate structure. Ahmed is using metabolomics to demonstrate the changes in the chemical profile of willows that might be correlated to the leaf retention at senescence. Moreover, he is carrying out quantitative analysis using NMR data of willow's extracts to monitor the changes in the concentration of primary metabolites at senescence and the influence of nitrogen treatment and soil types on the level of the discriminatory metabolites.