Dr Keabetswe Masike

Keabetswe obtained a BSc in Biochemistry and Psychology from the University of Johannesburg (UJ). She pursued a BSc Honours in Psychology (2012) and Biochemistry (2015), from the same institution.

Keabetswe further pursued a MSc in Biochemistry cum laude from UJ, where she focused on optimising extraction, chromatographic and mass spectrometric methods to cover a wide range of plant metabolites with varying polarities. Some pharmacologically relevant plant metabolites were observed to exist as isomers, so she opted to optimise both liquid chromatographic and mass spectrometric (LC-MS) techniques to distinguish these isomers. Some isomers produce similar mass spectral patterns, as such for her PhD from Stellenbosch University, she focused on the analyses of metabolites by integrating ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) to LC-MS where compounds were characterised based on their chromatographic, mass spectrometric and collision cross section (CCS) value data to aid in metabolite identification. During her research, Keabetswe learned to operate various LC-MS instruments for untargeted analyses (e.g., using LC-IT-ToF, LC-qToF) and targeted analyses (e.g., using LC-QqQ).