We would like to invite you to the lectures held by our guests from the University of Insubria, Italy:

Flavia Marinelli – Where will the novel antibiotics come from in nature? Lessons from R&D of life-saving glycopeptide antibiotics

Viviana Orlandi – Searching for next generation antimicrobial strategies

Gianluca Molla – Exploiting molecular biotechnology for a sustainable re(up)cycling of wastes

Lectures will be held in English. 

About speakers:

Flavia Marinelli

Her main research interests are: biosynthesis and mode of action of peptide and glycopeptide antibiotics; strain and process improvement for production of bioactive peptides and proteins; bacterial resistance to these antibiotics. She is very active researcher with international reputation and was involved in many projects, such as, she joined EU research consortia studying the microbial diversity: RAPIDS BIO4-CT-96-0332 RapidS Rational process innovation and design for Streptomyces; MICROMAT BIO4-CT98-0040 Biodiversity of microbial mats in Antarctica; ACTAPHARM QLRT-2001-01783 Novel sources of actinomycetes diversity for detection of antimicrobial agents with pharmaceutical applications; and more recently Metaexplore: metagenomics for bioexploration – tools and application, and the Cost Action CM0804 Chemical Biology with Natural Products. Till now she has published 94 papers on international peer reviewed journals and books, and she holds 4 patents on antiinfective molecules.

Viviana Orlandi

Her major research interest is focused on microbiological studies of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which can be considered as opportunistic pathogen to be eradicated however can be also used  as potential tool in bioremediation and white biotechnology. Viviana Orlandi applies different antibacterial approaches (synthetic and natural disinfectants, photodynamic antibacterial therapy) to control P. aeruginosa grown both as planktonic culture and in adherent community (biofilms) and investigate the bactericidal effect of common disinfectant against bacterial strains isolated from patients with persistent skin infections and the antimicrobial activities of extracts from African plants often used in traditional medicine. In the last years she focused her studies on the antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT), an approach which combines the use of a drug (photosensitizing agent) with visible light to kill pathogens.

Gianluca Molla

During his professional career, Gianluca Molla has been interested in the study of the structure / function relationship of enzymatic proteins using approaches of classical biochemistry, enzymology (rapid kinetics) and computational investigations (molecular dynamics and molecular docking). The studied proteins are of biomedical interest (involved in human pathologies) and biocatalytic (production of molecules of biotechnological interest). Recently Gianluca Molla is interested in enzymes capable of eliminating plastic polymers from the environment.