Mme Elisa Frezza » Team : Molecular mechanisms of viral RNA translation

Biographical Info

After a master’s degree in materials science at the University of Padua (Italy) in 2010, I continued my studies with a PhD at the Department of Chemical Sciences of the University of Padua under the supervision of Prof. Ferrarini, where I studied soft matter problems from a physical and theoretical chemistry point of view (e.g., the properties of liquid-crystalline phases constituted by double-stranded nucleic acid oligomers). During my postdoctoral fellowship (2014-2017) conducted at the MMSB CNRS UMR 5086/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 laboratory, under the supervision of Dr. Lavery, I dealt with biophysics and structural biology topics. Since September 2017, I am a lecturer at the Faculty of Pharmacy within the CiTCoM unit. My research activities focus on theoretical and computational studies of problems of interest to a broad community, from materials science to biology (e.g., mean-field theories, all-atom and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations, development of coarse-grained models, analysis of normal modes in internal coordinates, sampling methods, quantum chemical calculations). I deal with complex projects, requiring different methodologies, in collaboration with several teams of experimentalists and theoreticians. My research is thus interdisciplinary, at the interface between physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science, and spans on several scales (from the molecular scale to the meso and macro scale). Depending on the problem and the scale of the study, I develop and/or use different theoretical models and computational methods.

Research :

• Modelling of proteins and nucleic acids and their interactions – In collaboration with Dr. J. Martin (MMSB, Lyon);
• Development of coarse-grained models for biomacromolecules;
• Development and exploitation of normal mode analysis in internal coordinates to study large conformational changes in biomacromolecules;
• Chirality modeling at different scales – In collaboration with the team of Pr A. Ferrarini (University of Padova)
• Integration of experimental data at different scales
• Study of the relationship between the structural properties of nucleic acids and water dynamics – In collaboration with Dr E. Duboué-Dijon (UPR 9080, Paris) and Dr D. Laage (UMR 8640 Pasteur, ENS Chimie)
• Study of the NSP13 helicase of SARS-CoV-2 – In collaboration with the teams of Dr E. Rosta (UCL, London), Dr S. Harris (University of Leeds) and Dr G. Wells (UCL, London)

Expertise :

• Molecular modelling
• Physical chemistry
• Structural biology
• Bioinformatics
• Statistical mechanics