Nicola De Franceschi, Ph.D.

Nicola joined our lab to work in the SONATA project of Dr Katarzyna Bandyra. He proceeded to take up an independent position at iMol, Polish Academy of Sciences.

The cell is an incredibly complex machine and understanding it requires a multidisciplinary approach. To this aim, I combine structural biology, cell biology and synthetic biology, with a special emphasis on bottom-up reconstituted systems. I am particularly interested in how proteins mediate membrane shaping and transport and, conversely, how membranes integrate protein function at the mesoscale. To this goal, have developed several innovative methods to reconstitute and study protein-mediated membrane remodeling. My current project is aimed at studying transport processes across mitochondrial membranes, combining bottom-up reconstitution studies with high-resolution Cryo-EM imaging.