Giuseppina Rea

Institute of Crystallography Italy

GIUSEPPINA REA studies the molecular mechanisms and signal networks involved in plant defense responses to environmental stresses. Recently, the work has increasingly focused on the light events of photosynthesis and the structure/function relationships of the pigment-protein complexes involved in these processes. These studies are mainly applied to biosensors development for food quality assessment and environmental control, nutraceutics production and space biology. The expertise of Dr. Rea covers a wide variety of methodologies: i) designing of miniaturised optical biosensors for multiparametric fluorescence measurements of different photosynthesis-based biomediators; ii) computational-aided bioengineering of photosynthetic proteins; iii) site-directed and random mutagenesis of the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii D1 reaction centre protein; iv) isolation and expression profile of different genes involved in photosynthesis. Giuseppina Rea holds the position of permanent researcher at CNR-IC since December 2001. Dr. Rea is leading the CNR project Biotechnological applications of oxygenic photosynthetic organisms in the agro-food field: nutraceutics, biosensors and space biochips, which involves 5 researchers and 20 other people between permanent staff, postdoctoral scientists, and Ph.D. students. Actually, she is scientific responsible of two european and one italian founded programmes: 1) SENSBIOSYN (2009-2011): Biosensors and Sensors for the industrial biosynthesis process of widely used commercial antioxidants: nutraceuticals as additives for food and aquaculture promoting public health and safety. FP7-SME-2008-1. ID: 232522. 2) MULTIBIOPLAT (2008-2010): A new Biotechnology Platform for Multipurpose Biosensors. European project: EUROTRANS-BIO, ETB-2007-34. 3) BIOKIS-PHOTOEVOLUTION (2010-2011): Human Space Flight DC-VUS-2009-004. ASI-NASA. She actively participated to the EU project NUTRA-SNACK (2006-2009): Ready to eat food for breakfast and sport activity with high content of nutraceutics reducing a disease risk and promoting public health, FP6-ID 023044, and Italian project: MoMa (2006-2009): From Molecules to Man: Space research applied to the improvement of the Quality of Life of the Aging Population on Earth. Call ASI 2005. Now, she is involved in the EU project BEEP-C-EN (2010-2012): Bio-sensor for Effective Environmental Protection and Commercialization-ENhanced. FP7-SME-2008-1 ID: 232082. Recently, she received the Best Project 2009 Award, granted by the CNR Agrofood Department. FIVE RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS 1. Rea G, Polticelli F, Antonacci A, Scognamiglio V, Katiyar P, Kulkarni SA, Johanningmeier U, Giardi MT (2009) Structure-based design of novel Chlamydomonas reinhardtii D1-D2 photosynthetic proteins for herbicide monitoring. Protein Sci 18 (10):2139-51. 2. Giardi MT, Scognamiglio V, Rea G, Rodio G, Antonacci, A, Lambreva M, Pezzotti G, Johanningmeier U (2009) Optical biosensors for environmental monitoring based on computational and biotechnological tools for engineering the photosynthetic D1 protein of C. reinhardtii. Biosens Bioelectron 25, 294-300. 3. G Rea, A. Serafini, A. Margonelli, C. Faraloni, A Zanini, I Bertalan, U Johanningmeier, MT Giardi (2008). Ionizing radiation impacts photochemical quantum yield and oxygen evolution activity of photosystem II in photosynthetic microorganisms. Int J Radiat Biol 84 (11):867-77. 4. A Tibuzzi, G Rea, G Pezzotti, D Esposito, U Johanningmeier, MT Giardi (2007). A new miniaturized multiarrays biosensor system for fluorescence detection. J Phys Condens Matter 19, art. N. 395006. 5. G Rea, M Volpicella, F De Leo, L Zolla, R Gallerani, LR Ceci (2007). Characterization of three members of the multigene family coding for isoforms of the chlorophyll-a/b-binding protein Lhcb1 in spinach. Physiol Plant 130 (1), 167-176.

Giuseppina Rea

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