Mario Pezzotti
|
Associate
Professor
of Plant Genetics Università
degli Studi di Verona (Italy) |
|
Curriculum in
brief
1981
Graduated in Agricultural Sciences (
1984
Research Fellow, Italian National Research Council
(C.N.R.-Perugia)
1986
Visiting Scientist, S.B. Gelvin
laboratory (
1990
Research Fellow, Plant Breeding Institute (
1991-93 Post
Doc, Plant Genetic System (Gent
1997-98
Lecturer of Plant Genetic Resources (
1997-99 Member
of Italian Agricultural Genetics Society
Advisory Board
1998-Present:
Associate Professor (Verona University)
Scientific Interests:
Molecular Farming
No
effective preventive therapy is currently available for human type 1
diabetes
mellitus (T1DM). Since 90% of subjects with T1DM have no
affected
relatives, primary prevention in the general population is the ultimate
goal.
None of the preventive therapies so far investigated combines all the
features
- efficacy, safety, specificity, low cost and applicability to the
general
population - required for primary prevention. Induction of oral
tolerance would
satisfy all these requirements with the exception of the high cost of
producing
large quantities of recombinant human proteins. Autoantigen-expressing
transgenic plants overcome this problem, since they allow the
recombinant
proteins to be produced on a large scale at a relatively low cost.
GAD65 is a
major autoantigen in T1DM, and
GAD65-transformed
edible plant organs could provide a simple and direct method of
inducing oral
tolerance with the ultimate aim to achieve a primary prevention of T1DM.
Petunia
hybrida as a model species to understand meiosis and cell
expansion
Study of plant development and evolution, using Petunia hybrida as a key system. A combination of
molecular,
genetic and morphological approaches are being used to determine how
cell
division and expansion cooperate during flower development in Petunia.
Areas of
interest include genes controlling cell division, expansion and the
switch from
mitosis to meiosis. Expertise includes genetics, transposon-tagging,
site-selected gene inactivation, in situ hybridisation, morphological
analysis and FTIR spectroscopy.
Functional
analysis of grape
The recent sequencing
and annotation of the V. Vinifera
grapevine genome
(French-Italian Consortium for Grapevine Genome Characterization, 2007)
will
provide tools to study deeply different biological processes in
grapevine. The
information derived by the genome characterization allows to apply a
“Whole Transciptome” microarray
analysis to describe the development, the ripening and the withering
post-harvest
processes in berry of V. vinifera cv.
Corvina.
The genome sequencing offers also the possibility to
identify putative
regulatory genes that play role in the control of the volatile benzenoid synthesis and of the pH value changes
during the
development and ripening in cv. Corvina
berry. The identification of these regulatory genes is based on models
that
have already been described in Petunia hybrida
(Quattrocchio et al., 2006 (pdf);
Verdonk et al., 2005 (pdf)).