Lucia Banci

Biography

Lucia Banci is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florence. Born in Florence, May 20, 1954 Laure in Chimica, 110/110 and praise, July 1978, University of Florence He has published more than 350 research articles and has solved over 100 facilities. (H-Index (Google Scholar) = 67) Lucia Banci is one of the founders and director of the Center for Magnetic Resonances (CERM) at the University of Florence. The Center is a European NMR infrastructure applied to life sciences and is a node of ESFRI "Instruct" infrastructure.

Research Interest

Lucia Banci's research expertise is focused on structural biology, within an integrated, cellular perspective. She is extensively exploiting high resolution NMR spectroscopy, to which she has also contributed with methodological and theoretical advancements. Her research work focuses on systems that are involved in several pathways responsible for metal homeostasis, and that of copper and iron in particular, and on protein import and maturation processes in mitochondria, through metal incorporation and / or oxidative folding. In her research she is exploiting the combination, in an integrated manner, of NMR, SAXS and X-ray crystallography. She is providing unique contributions to the mechanical aspects of Systems Biology of metal ions. She has been pioneer in the development of, and she is now exploiting, an absolutely innovative approach to vaccine design, ie Structural Vaccinology, based on the structural characterization of the antigens and their interaction with antibodies. Most recently she has also made and is making major advances in developing innovative approaches in in-cell NMR and is applying them for characterizing the conformational and functional states of proteins at atomic resolution directly in living cells. Finally, she is characterizing proteins that are naturally unstructured or partially unfolded and the mechanisms of protein aggregation involved in several neurological diseases. She is one of the founders and now Director of the Center of Magnetic Resonance (CERM) of the University of Florence, which features an impressive battery of NMR spectrometers.