Anna avesani

I received my Bachelor degree in Biomedical Laboratory Techniques at the University of Verona. During the degree course I’ve had the chance to serve an internship in clinical pharmacy, in which I learned to work with animal models. Then I moved to Milan, where I took the Master's degree in Medical Biotechnologies, with a master thesis internship in the research laboratory of Medical Genetics at the S. Paolo Hospital. My main research interest was to evaluate the mosaicism in patients with an established phenotype but negative diagnosis through the analysis of Next Generation Sequencing exome. After graduation, I attended the laboratory of Neurology and then of Physiology at the University of Verona. Here I learned technical skills and competences on the immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence techniques and confocal and multiphoton microscopy and improved my experience on handling and treatment of transgenic mouse models. 

I joined to the BMB group as a PhD student in September 2018 where my main research interest is the investigation of proteins and the mechanism underlying the phototransduction process associated to retinal dystrophies applying in vitro and in vivo approaches. In details, I am focused on the structural and function characterization of GCAP2 and its retinal dystrophy-associated variant G157R through the use of spectroscopic and biophysical approaches. 

I am also involved in a project with a team of ophthalmologists on patients suffering from Dry-eye disease with the aim to evaluate the morphologic cell changes and to identify and quantify biomolecular markers before and after eye-drops treatment.