About me
I graduated in Medicine at the University of Pavia, Italy in 2003 and specialized in Medical Oncology at the University of Turin, Italy in 2007. From 2008 until 2010, I worked in Ivan Dikic’s lab at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany and in 2011 I obtained a PhD in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics at the University of Pavia, Italy. From 2011 until 2014 I was a postdoc in Alexander van Oudenaarden’s lab at MIT, where I worked on developing novel single-molecule microscopy methods. Since 2015, I have been leading my own research group at Karolinska Institutet, with a major focus on developing microscopy- and sequencing-based methods to investigate genome fragility and genome organization in healthy and pathological cell states. Since 2022 I also lead the Genomic Technologies Development Unit in the Genomics Research Centre at Human Technopole in Milan, Italy.
Over the years, I have developed numerous molecular methods, including the first method for genome-wide mapping of DNA double-strand breaks (BLESS, Nat Meth 2013) and its downstream improvements (BLISS, Nat Commun 2017; sBLISS, Nat Prot 2020), as well as a variety of sequencing- (CUTseq, Nat Commun 2019; GPSeq, Nat Biotechnol 2020; COVseq, Nat Commun 20221) and microscopy-based methods (HD-FISH, Nat Meth 2013; FuseFISH, Cell Rep 2014; RollFISH, Comm Bio 2018; iFISH, Nat Commun 2019; FRET-FISH, Nat Commun 2022) for studying various aspects of genome organization and fragility.
Research description
Our main research interest is in understanding how the nucleus of eukaryotic cells is spatially organized, and how the three-dimensional (3D) architecture of the genome influences gene expression regulation and genome integrity.
We are particularly interested in understanding the role of 3D genome architecture and genome fragility in the context of cancer, aiming at developing improved diagnostic and patient stratification approaches.
Towards these goals, we combine high-end microscopy methods, next-generation sequencing techniques, and advanced computational tools, to assess chromosomal contacts, chromatin modifications, DNA breaks, chromosomal rearrangements and gene expression levels in cultured cells and patient-derived tissue samples.