PROJECT
SUPERVISORS

Project Supervisor

Ilaria Piazza

Background

My adventure with my scientific research seriously started with my PhD studies at EMBL in Heidelberg, There I embarked on a project studying the molecular machines regulating chromatin structure and gene expression during the cell cycle using yeast genetics, cell and structural biology. During my PhD I also stumbled into crosslinking mass spectrometry and proteomics. 

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This brought me to study protein structures with a -omics perspective in at ETH Zurich and later in the industry. Now, the goal of my research as group leader is to study how metabolism regulates chromatin architecture and its impact on gene expression using proteomics, genomics and metabolomics.

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Research

Different environmental cues such as stress, nutrients or drugs, trigger rapid adaptive responses that allow to maintain cellular homeostasis. Physical interactions among environmental factors (e.g: metabolites) and protein biomolecules define how cell systems work mechanistically.

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The binding events between proteins and ligands produce variations of protein activity as a consequence of a structural changes that occur instantly. We use advanced proteomics technologies based on mass spectrometry to capture the complexity of this network and explain how of the metabolic status of the cell regulates gene expression in health and disease.

Important: Ilaria Piazza is relocating her laboratory from the Max Delbrück Center to the Univerisity of Stockholm. Therefore, the doctoral candidate accepted for her project would be based in Stockholm.

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Publications

A. Mateus et al., The rise of proteome‐wide biophysics. Molecular Systems Biology, 17, (2021).

V. Cappelletti et al., Dynamic 3D proteomes reveal protein functional alterations at high resolution in situ, Cell, 12, (2021).

I. Piazza et al., A machine learning-based chemoproteomic approach to identify drug targets and binding sites in complex proteomes. Nature Communications, 11 (2020).

I. Piazza et al., A map of protein-metabolite interactions reveals principles of chemical communications. Cell, 11 (2019).