Lucia Banci - Biography#

Full CV (as for January 2014)

Lucia Banci has a high level international reputation for her original contribution and high impact breakthroughs in Structural Biology and in biological NMR. She is recognized as a world class leader in the characterization of functional processes in a cellular context, at atomic resolution. She has addressed and unveiled many aspects of the biology of metal ions, from their homeostasis mechanisms to metal trafficking processes to their incorporation into the final receiving proteins. She developed a molecular systems biology approach which integrates structural, interaction and dynamical information with the thermodynamic properties of the processes so to have a unified picture of the pathways responsible of metal ion trafficking, with particular focus on copper.

Over the last years Lucia Banci exploited the extensive knowledge and expertise in structural biology technologies to develop an absolutely innovative approach to vaccine design, which she first named «Structural Vaccinology». It is based on the knowledge of the structure of the pathogen antigens and their interaction patterns with antibodies, to design structure-based vaccines. With this approach she provided an essential contribution to the development of a vaccine against the Meningococcus B pathogen, which is characterized by several variants, each exhibiting different epitopes on a very effective antigen. The knowledge of the structural properties allowed the design of a chimera antigen which has complete protectiveness against all the variants.

Finally the most recent line of research, i.e in cell NMR elicited a very high interest in various scientific communities, either interested in new technological advancements in NMR or in the striking new knowledge obtained on biological processes. The innovative in cell NMR approach developed by Lucia Banci and her group allows the detection of human individual proteins (a single one or more, such as partner proteins) with atomic level resolution within living human cells. This approach constitutes a bridge between cellular studies (which maintain the cellular environment but lack atomic information) and structural characterization (which provides a detailed, atomic level description).