Molecular bioengineering

Engineered bacterial pores can decode digital information stored in tailored-made polymers. Credit: Matteo Dal Peraro (aerolysin structure)/iStock (background)

We aim at exploiting the fundamental knowledge acquired about structure and dy-namics of biological systems to control, modulate and interfere with their properties for therapeutic intervention developing structure-based molecular entities and for biotechno-logical applications. A prototypical example within this research axis is aerolysin, a biological nanopore that we solved and characterised within an IM framework and now is exploited in our lab as a promising molecular sensor for single-molecule detection of nucleic acids, proteins and polymers.