I am a Master Student in Biology at the University of Bari (Italy). I got two Erasmus Traineeship Fellowships at CBL in 2015-2016. I have been recently granted also a pre-graduate fellowship by the Danish Cancer Society to continue my research at CBL. I am planning to defend my Master Thesis in November 2017.
I have a strong background in biology and biotechnology and I am consolidating my expertise and skills in bioinformatics and molecular modelling.
At CBL, I am carrying out integrative analyses of cancer-mutations and post-translational modification databases, as well as enhanced-sampling, NMR-driven and conventional atomistic molecular dynamics simulations. I am also applying a python pipeline developed by other CBL members to carry out saturation mutagenesis in silico on proteins and protein complexes with other biological partners.
The DCS fellowship will allow me to learn also approaches for the analysis of NGS data with particular attention to the data deposited in TCGA database.
With this rich portfolio of tools, I am addressing different important biological questions: i) the role of protein dynamics on the activity of key ubiquitinating enzymes for cell cycle progression, ii) the interactions between DNA and DNA-binding domains of ARID/Bright transcription factors and the related structural communication from DNA binding loops to distal sites of the protein, iii) the role of modular domains for protein-protein interactions in other transcription factors, iv) the effects of cancer mutations on the intrinsic dynamics and protein-protein or protein-DNA interactions of the aforementioned cases of study.
Poster Presentation at Conferences
24th November 2015, 3rd Danish Protein Molecular Modellers Meeting, University of Copenhagen (DK) - Main author and co-author of two posters, respectively.
1st December 2015, 14th Protein.DTU Workshop - Future Trends in Protein Science, DTU, Lyngby (DK) - Main author of a poster.