Chiara Lanzuolo

Chiara LANZUOLO

Head of the Chromatin and Nuclear Architecture Laboratory

National Institute of Molecular Genetics, Milan, Italy

Chiara Lanzuolo is a CNR researcher (permanent position at Institute of Biomedical Technologies, Milan) responsible for the Chromatin and Nuclear Architecture laboratory at the National Institute of Molecular Genetics (INGM), Milan (Italy). She obtained degree with honours in Biological Sciences, at University of Naples "Federico II" in 1998, and, in 2002 she obtained her PhD in Genetics at the Ecole Normale Superieure of Lyon, France, working on the isolation and characterization of yeast telomerase mutants showing overelongation of telomeres in vivo (published in 2006 in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology). From 2002 to 2011, she worked as "postdoctoral research scientist" in the laboratory of Valerio Orlando in Naples and Rome, where she became interested in chromatin dynamics and conformation, being pioneer in setting up in fly the innovative Chromosome Conformation Capture (3C) technology (published in 2007 in Nature Cell Biology). ln 2012 Dr. Lanzuolo was awarded with “young investigator” grant to start her independent research activity. Her group is devoted in understanding how the genome folding occur in the nuclear space and how this conformation is then maintained in dynamic physiological processes in health and in disease. Their research provided new insights into Lamin biology, describing for the first time a functional and evolutionary conserved crosstalk between the nuclear Lamin A/C and the PcG proteins, this being required for the maintenance of the PcG repressive functions (published in 2015 in The Journal of Cell Biology). Recently they finalized two works that describe the role of PcG/Lamin AC interplay in two Lamin A diseases: Emery Dreifuss Muscular Dystrophy (published in 2020 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation) and Hutchinson Gilford Progeria Syndrome (published in 2020 in Nature Communications). In both works they described how mutation of Lamin A can generate a dysfunctional Polycomb program leading to a defect in cell identity maintenance. The group is also committed in development of new technologies, as the new high-throughput sequencing technique to study different levels of chromatin solubility, the SAMMY-seq (patented in December 2020).