Dr Marina Inés Giannotti

Marina Inés Giannotti is Senior Researcher at the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red (CIBER) in the subject area of Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN), working at the Nanoprobes & Nanoswitches research group of the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), Spain.

She has always been motivated to understand the structure-nanomechanics-function relationship in biosystems, concentrating on different phenomena and events related to non-covalent associations/interactions. In this sense, AFM is a key technique to study supramolecular interactions and the role of different factors. The two main focuses of her research are lipid membranes, and macromolecules’ structure and communication between proteins, to address fundamental questions of relevance in biology, both in physiological and pathological circumstances.

Working with model membranes and using mainly AFM for imaging and force spectroscopy -measuring indentation or stretching membrane tubes- to study the structure and packing of the different coexisting phases, her research has contributed to the understanding of the structural and mechanical implications of the different membrane constituents, including cholesterol and glycolipids, as well as actors external to the membrane, such as extracellular glycans or proteins. Currently, her efforts are focused on investigating lipid imbalances associated with different pathologies.

In addition, Marina uses single-molecule force spectroscopy (SMFS) to understand the behaviour of different macromolecules at the individual level in liquid environment. She investigated the protein-protein interaction in relation to its electron transport (ET) function in the photosynthetic and the mitochondrial respiratory chains, in collaboration with Prof. P. Gorostiza and Dr. A. Lagunas, experts in single protein nanoconductance. Besides obtaining structural parameters of the individual proteins, AFM-SMFS contributes to define the molecular mechanisms that regulate ET within and between proteins.

Marina I. Giannotti

Recent AFM papers:

• Gomila A. M. J., Pérez-Mejías G., Nin-Hill A., Guerra-Castellano A., Casas-Ferrer L., Ortiz-Tescari S., Díaz-Quintana A., Samitier J., Rovira C., De la Rosa M. A., Díaz-Moreno I., Gorostiza P., Giannotti M. I., Lagunas A. (2022). Phosphorylation disrupts long-distance electron transport in cytochrome Nature Communications 13, 7100

• Zamora R. A., López-Ortiz M., Sales-Mateo M., Hu C., Croce R., Maniyara R. A., Pruneri V., Giannotti M. I., Gorostiza P. (2022). Light- and Redox-Dependent Force Spectroscopy Reveals that the Interaction between Plastocyanin and Plant Photosystem I Is Favored when One Partner Is Ready for Electron Transfer ACS Nano 16, 15155-15164 

Biography: Marina is a Senior Researcher at the CIBER-BBN and Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in Barcelona, Spain. She is a chemist, and she completed her PhD in Materials Science at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (Argentina) in 2004. Next, she joined the lab of Prof. Vancso in the University of Twente (The Netherlands) thanks to a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship, where she specialized in single molecule force spectroscopy, among other AFM-based approaches. Since 2008 Marina works in Barcelona, on biophysics of biosystems like membranes and proteins, focused on the nanomechanics and interactions in relation with function, where AFM and Force Spectroscopy are key fundamental tools.

Twitter: @GiannottiMarina

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marina-giannotti-13978a8/

Website: https://ibecbarcelona.eu/member/135/Marina+In%C3%A9s+Giannotti/

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