palina.nepachalovich [at] tu-dresden.de
Tel: +49 351 796-5631
Fax: +49 351 796-36699
Twitter: @PNepachalovich

Palina Nepachalovich

PhD student

Palina graduated from the Belarusian State University with a degree in Radiation Chemistry in 2019 and afterwards started an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree Program at the University of Lille (France). As a part of the joint program, she continued her Master’s studies at the University of Leipzig (Germany), where she worked on her Master’s thesis in Maria Fedorova’s group. During this time, Palina contributed to the extensive characterization of MS/MS fragmentation pathways of oxidized lipids and was involved in collaborative projects to apply a new epilipidomics pipeline. After receiving her Master’s degree in Advanced Spectroscopy in Chemistry in 2021, she moved to Dresden together with other lab members, and since the beginning of 2022, Palina is a doctoral student at the Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering ( DIGS-BB).

Research interests

Palina’s research focuses on lipid chemistry and epilipidomics data analysis. Her doctoral project is devoted to conceptualizing of a lipid quality control (LQC) machinery, which, like a maintenance team, ensures the proper composition and function of the cellular lipidome. In comparison to relatively well-studied protein or DNA quality control systems, LQC is much less investigated, but Palina envisions it as a set of mechanisms activated in various biological contexts to keep lipidome in homeostasis. For example, redox stress, common for many pathologies from ischemia-reperfusion injury to cancer, is accompanied by oxidative damage to plasma membrane lipids, which compromises cell integrity. And the goal of Palina’s work is to find out which LQC mechanisms, in addition to the well-recognized system of antioxidants and redox enzymes, contribute to counteracting lipid oxidation-mediated cell death.