Elena Nikonova

Elena Nikonova is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Physiological Chemistry at the Biomedical Center, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany. She received her undergraduate BA degree in biochemistry at the University of Thessaly in Greece where she worked on the metagenomic analysis of bacterial chloride of the insect Cydia pomonella under the supervision of Dr. Dimitrios Mossialos. In September 2016 she received an M.Sc. degree in biochemistry at the LMU, after conducting her Master Thesis at the Max-Plank Institute of Biochemistry (Munich, Germany) in the lab of Dr. Frank Schnorrer, where she worked on flight-muscle specific splice factor Bruno1 (Aret, Bru1) in D. melanogaster. As a research assistant in the lab of Dr. Barbara Conradt (Biocenter, LMU), she performed phenotypic characterizations and SNP mapping of C.elegans mutant defective in early cell division.

Her Ph.D. research in Dr. Maria Spletter group is focusing on the role of Drosophila splice factor Bruno1, a CELF family homolog, in regulation and control of flight muscle-specific alternative splicing.