Noxolo Ntuli

CHI research group: Global Medicine and General Health (GMGH)

Noxolo Ntuli is a PhD student at the University of Cape Town supervised by Prof. Reto Guler. Before joining UCT, she was involved in respiratory diseases genomic research as a Medical Scientist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) in Johannesburg. She was part of the team that discovered Omicron in South Africa. In her PhD, she hopes to achieve the following outcomes: (1) Unique African resource of concordant genetic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic profiles of healthy and Mtb-infected macrophages; (2) the only genome-wide map of healthy and Mtb-infected macrophage eQTLs and ReQTLs, and transcriptome-wide compendium of prioritized and in silico functionalized miRNAs, lncRNAs, transcription factors (TFs), and coding genes with central roles in macrophage host response; (3) validated drug targets and factors in the host response to infection by Mtb.  

Research engagements:

·         Genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in South Africa

·         Genomic surveillance of influenza in South Africa

·         Targeting non-coding RNAs as host-directed drug therapy for tuberculosis