Gaia Pigino

Gaia Pigino

Gaia Pigino is a biologist, currently Associate Head of the Structural Biology Center at Human Technopole, after 9 years as Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute CBG in Dresden. She collaborate with Alessandro Vannini to develop the Centre for Structural Biology. Gaia’s laboratory studies molecular mechanisms and principles of self-organisation in cilia and other subcellular structures that are of fundamental importance for human health and disease.

CURRENT POSITION

Since 2021 Associate Head of the Structural Biology Center at Human Technopole, Milan, Italy
Since 2012 Research Group Leader at MPI-CBG, the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden, Germany

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH

2010-2012 Postdoctoral EMBO Long Term fellow Laboratory of Biomolecular Research (BMR), Department of Biology and Chemistry, Paul Scherer Institute (PSI) Switzerland. Supervisor: Prof. T. Ishikawa.
2009-2011 Postdoctoral researcher Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich), Zurich, Switzerland. Supervisor: Prof. T. Ishikawa.
2007-2009 Postdoctoral MIUR research fellow Fellowship of the “Ministero Italiano dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca”. Laboratory of Cryotechniques for Electron Microscopy, Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Siena. Supervisor: Prof. P. Lupetti.
2009 Participant at the Physiology Course at MBL in Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole. Directors: Dyche Mullins and Claire Waterman.

EDUCATION

2003-2007 Ph.D. Student (Ph.D. Fellowship by the Italian government “Ministero Italiano dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca”). Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Siena. Supervisor: Prof. F. Bernini and Prof. C. Leonzio.
2002 Diploma in Natural Science (Summa cum laude). University of Siena, Italy. Thesis supervisors: Prof. C. Leonzio and Prof. F. Bernini.

OTHER POSITIONS

2003 Research Associate. Department of Environmental Sciences G. Sarfatti, University of Siena. Advisor: Prof. C. Leonzio

AWARDS and FUNDING

2022 EMBO Member
2019 DFG Grant – GAČR-DFG Cooperation
2018 PoL starting fellowship (from the Dresden Excellence Cluster ‘Physics of Life’)
2018 Keith R. Porter Fellow Award for Cell Biology
2018 ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2018-COG N#819826 CiliaTubulinCode)
2018 Excellence Cluster ‘Physics of Life’, as a core Principal Investigator
2010 EMBO Long Term fellowship
2009 Scholarship from the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, Massachusetts) MBL Physiology Course.
2007 Post-Doctoral Research fellowship from MIUR.
2003 Ph.D. Fellowship from MIUR.

Fellowship to students and postdocs

2022 EMBO Long Term Fellowship to Helen Foster
2021 EMBO Postdoc Fellowship to Nikolai Klena
2019 HFSP Postdoc Fellowship to Adrian Nievergelt
2018 EMBO Long Term Fellowship to Adrian Nievergelt
2017 Marie Curie Fellowship to Adam Schröfel (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016)
2015 DIGS-BB Fellowship to Guendalina Marini
2012 DIGS-BB Fellowship to Ludek Stepanek

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Publications

  • 07/2019 - Methods in Cell Biology

    Content-aware image restoration for electron microscopy

    Multiple approaches to use deep neural networks for image restoration have recently been proposed. Training such networks requires well registered pairs of high and low-quality images. While this is easily achievable for many imaging modalities, e.g., fluorescence light microscopy, for others it is not. Here we summarize on a number of recent developments in the […]

  • 06/2019 - Methods in Cell Biology

    Yeast membraneless compartments revealed by correlative light microscopy and electron tomography

    Yeast essential enzymes are able to assemble and form membrane-less compartments in the cytoplasm during stress conditions (Narayanaswamy et al., 2009). These microcompartments form rapidly under ATP-depletion upon cellular regulation of pH and molecular crowding (Munder et al., 2016). So far, the behavior of most of these enzymes has been characterized by live imaging using fluorescence […]

  • 05/2019 - Methods in Cell Biology

    In situ cryo-electron tomography and subtomogram averaging of intraflagellar transport trains

    In situ cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and subtomogram averaging are powerful tools, able to provide 3D structures of biological samples at sub-nanometer resolution, while preserving information about cellular context and higher-order assembly. Best results are typically achieved, when applied to highly repetitive structures, such as viruses. Other typical examples are protein complexes that decorate long stretches along ciliary microtubules at […]

  • 11/2018 - Nature Cell Biology

    The cryo-EM structure of intraflagellar transport trains reveals how dynein is inactivated to ensure unidirectional anterograde movement in cilia

    Movement of cargos along microtubules plays key roles in diverse cellular processes, from signalling to mitosis. In cilia, rapid movement of ciliary components along the microtubules to and from the assembly site is essential for the assembly and disassembly of the structure itself1. This bidirectional transport, known as intraflagellar transport (IFT)2, is driven by the […]

  • 10/2018 - ArXiv

    Cryo-CARE: Content-Aware Image Restoration for Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscopy Data

    Multiple approaches to use deep learning for image restoration have recently been proposed. Training such approaches requires well registered pairs of high and low quality images. While this is easily achievable for many imaging modalities, e.g. fluorescence light microscopy, for others it is not. Cryo-transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM) could profoundly benefit from improved denoising methods, […]