Francesco Tavanti
Department of Chemical and Geological Sciences
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Via G. Campi 103, 41125, Modena
Phone: +39 0592058550
Francesco Tavanti was born in Foiano della Chiana (AR), August 24, 1986. He received his bachelor degree in Physics at the University of Siena with a thesis entitled 'Experimental study of LIAD effect from PDMS and porous silica'.
He received his master degree in Physics (curriculum Medical Physics) at the University of Pisa (17/07/2013) with a thesis entitled 'Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Rhodopsins with Multi-scale Models' [1]. During his master thesis he worked under the supervision of tutor Dr. Valentina Tozzini on creation, on improvment and on merging two kinds of models: a multi-scale model, wich means two different resolutions in the same system, and multi-stable model, wich means two different stable configurations for the rhodopsins. He implemented for the DL_POLY software some functional forms that weren't defined: the double-well function for the harmonic, morse and cosine potentials.
He has experience of Fortran77/90 and Matlab programming and as user of software for molecular modeling and simulation (DL_POLY, Gromacs, VMD, DL_MESO).
At present, he is a Post-doc at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, under the supervision of Prof. M. C. Menziani.
He participated at the CCP5 Summer School 2014 where he attended the advanced course on "Mesoscale methods".
His research is focused on:
interaction of proteins with gold nano particles (AuNPs) and with silver surfaces with Coarse Grained (CG), full atomisitc (AA) and multi-scale (M-S) models [2,3,5].
simulations of Amyloid-beta fibrils with cur cumin-like molecules for early diagnosis and therapy
He is co-author of 7 papers published on international journals.
[1] F. Tavanti, V. Tozzini. A Multi-Scale--Multi-Stable Model for the Rhodopsin Photocycle. Molecules. 2014, 19, 14961-14978.
[2] F. Tavanti, A. Pedone, M. C. Menziani. A closer look into the ubiquitin corona on gold nanoparticles by computational studies. New Journal of Chemistry, 2015, 39, 2474-2482.
[3] F. Tavanti, A. Pedone, M. C. Menziani. Competitive Binding of Proteins to Gold Nanoparticles disclosed by Molecular Dynamics Simulations, The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 2015, 119, 22171-22180.
[4] F. Muniz-Miranda, F. Lodesani, F. Tavanti, D. Presti, D. Malferrari, A. Pedone. Supercritical CO2 Confined in Palygorskite and Sepiolite Minerals: a Molecular Dynamics Investigation, The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, 2016, 120, 26945-26954.
[5] P. Matteini, M. Cottat, F. Tavanti, E. Panfilova, M. Scuderi, G. Nicotra, M. C. Menziani, N. Khlebtsov, M. de Angelis, R. Pini. Site-Selective Surface-Enhanced Raman Detection of Proteins. ACS Nano, 2017, 11, 918-926.
[6] Sergey Deyev, Galina Proshkina, Anastasiya Ryabova, Francesco Tavanti, Maria Cristina Menziani, Gennady Eidelshtein, Gabriel Avishai, Alexander B Kotlyar, "Synthesis, Characterization and Selective Delivery of DARPin-Gold Nanoparticle Conjugates to Cancer Cells", Bioconjugate Chemistry, 2017, 28, 2569–2574.
[7] Francesco Tavanti, Alfonso Pedone, Paolo Matteini, Maria Cristina Menziani, "Computational Insight into the Interaction of Cytochrome c with Wet and PVP-Coated Ag Surfaces", Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 2017, 121, 9532–9540.