23-Oct-2026
Instruct-IT hosted a structural biology meeting in Florence on 20 October, bringing together the community for a day of talks, networking and discussions to highlight structural biology research in Italy, and the available access opportunities through Instruct.
The event was hosted at CERM/CIRMMP, Instruct Centre Italy, and introduced by Lucia Banci, one of its founders and former directors.
The morning session included talks from Beatrice Vallone (University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’), who emphasised the use of structural biology for drug design, Winfried Weissenhorn (Institut de Biologie Structurale), who discussed membrane remodelling, and Roberta Pierattelli (University of Florence), who introduced CERM/CIRMMP.
Instruct Director Harald Schwalbe also gave a summary of Instruct-IT, which was a founding member of Instruct-ERIC, highlighting how Italy-based members have benefited from Instruct-funded Internships, R&D awards and training courses before presenting his work on using light to study protein, RNA and DNA refolding.
Lucia Banci, Instruct-IT (left) and Harald Schwalbe, Instruct Director (right) gave talks.
The afternoon hosted a variety of speakers from local universities, including the University of Bologna, the University of Verona and the University of Florence, with the session kicked off by Barbara Zambelli, who discussed NDRG1 in lung cancer. Additionally, talks included speakers from Italian research institutes. Alessandro Piai (IRBM SpA) highlighted a SARS-CoV-2 case study utilising NMR for hit discovery and qualification, while Matteo Tassinari (Human Technopole) presented work on the molecular mechanism of thyroid hormone transport by MCT8 and MCT10.
Several talks focused on NMR, with Linda Cerofolini demonstrating its use for the characterisation of biotherapeutics, Enrico Luchinat highlighting its applications in-cell for studying protein conformation and ligand binding and Marco Schiavina showing how ultra-high field NMR can increase the resolution of intrinsically disordered proteins.
Instruct-CZ was also in attendance and represented by Jiri Novacek from CEITEC, who discussed the development of cryo-CLEM towards versatile service for structural biology.
Roberta Pierattelli, Instruct-IT (left), Winfried Weissenhorn, Instruct-FR (middle) and Jiri Novacek, Instruct-CZ (right) gave presentations.
Instruct-ERIC R&D Call 2022 Awardee Michael Assfalg gave a talk on structural work into tau ubiquitination, which benefited from access to CERM, Instruct-DE and Instruct-FI.
Michael Assfalg gave a talk on structural insights into tau ubiquitination.
The final talk of the day came from Antonio Rosato, from the University of Florence, who showed applications of machine learning and molecular dynamics simulations for the investigation of metalloproteins.
The conference was a great opportunity to bring together the Italy structural biology community and to celebrate the local research.
Find out more about Instruct-IT here, and apply for funded access to structural biology technologies available at CERM/CIRMMP here.
