Who am I?
My name is Sviatoslav Kharuk I’m a biochemist with a profound love of bioinformatics. I’m always eager to learn new things and gain skills.
Short bio
I recently completed my Bachelor’s in Biochemistry from Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University of Ukraine. Throughout my undergraduate studies, I specialized in molecular biology and gained a comprehensive understanding of biochemical processes.
During my time at university, I was fortunate to receive two scholarships, one personal from the Believe in Yourself Foundation and the other from the Institute of Eastern European Studies for academic excellence and active scientific research.
Additionally, throughout the studies, I was doing two research projects focused on how starvation in the early stages of Drosophila development impacts imago metabolism and a diploma project concerning the investigation of the intranasal administration of peptides to the mouse brain.
During my BSc program, I gained laboratory techniques including measuring metabolites, fluorescence spectroscopy, DNA extraction, DNA electrophoresis, PCR and Western Blot.
Moreover, I developed strong analytical and problem-solving skills, which proved invaluable during my research projects.
My education has fueled my passion for scientific exploration, and I am eager to contribute my knowledge and skills to the field of biomedical research. I started to be interested in bioinformatics in my 2nd year of studies. I was attending a university bioinformatics course, an internship at Universitätsklinikum Münster, a Bioinformatics course from DAAD and the last and most meaningful was the Biological Data Science Summer School. My main bioinformatics interests are genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics.
Also, I have completed Data Analysis Workshop and on the final project I was doing data cleaning, visualization and data analysis. Google Collab notebook for final project.
Currently I’m doing an internship at EMBL, under Wolfgang Huber supervision
Research
Thesis project
Effect of early developmental starvation on metabolism in Drosophila melanogaster.
The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of starvation in the early stages of development on some physiological and biochemical parameters in flies that were starved for certain periods of time at the third larval stage (L3).
Some publications about this work first and second, p. 30.
Diploma project
Effect of peptides amino acid sequence on the efficiency of intranasal delivery to the mouse brain.
The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of amino acid sequence and peptide concentration on the efficiency of peptide delivery to the brain.
Some conclusions from the study:
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Cationic peptides with a high content of lipophilic and cationic amino acids effectively penetrate the BBB into the brain of mice when administered intranasally, even in the absence of specific receptor recognition.
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The efficiency of peptide delivery decreases with the concentration of the injected peptide, which makes it impractical to use solutions in concentrations above 100 μM.
Published thesis on this work (p. 19).
Poster for this thesis:
To make easier writing disscusion for diploma I wrote a code which calculates the amino acids composition of peptides.
For my first programming project, I’ve decided based on the previous code to create an app (AminoAcidsCounter) which calculates amino acids and then plots the graph using Python’s Streamlit library.
The preview of the app:
To run the app click on https://aminoacidcounter.streamlit.app/
Publications/Thesis
Kharuk S., Shturmak A. Study of intranasal delivery of peptides to the brain of mice (in Ukrainian). 92nd Scientific and Practical Conference of Students and Young Scientists with International Participation “Innovations in medicine and pharmacy”, p. 19. (March, 2023).
Stefanyshyn N. P., Strilbytska O. M., Semaniuk, U.V., Burdyliuk N. I., Kharuk S. V. Starvation during development affects metabolism in Drosophila. BIOTECHNOLOGIA ACTA, V. 16, No 2, (2023) https://doi.org/10.15407/biotech16.02.044.
Stefanyshyn N., Strilbytska O., Kharuk S., Berezovskyi V. Starvation of third instar larvae affects content of stored metabolites in adult Drosophila, The international conference “Drosophila in experimental genetics and biology”, p. 30 (June, 2023).
For more detailed information visit my CV section.