Biography:

Nicoletta Liguori is a physicist with experimental and computational experience in biomolecular physics, especially in photosynthesis. She graduated cum laude in physics at Università degli Studi Roma Tre (IT), after an MSc thesis in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of biomolecules at UC Berkeley (US). For her Ph.D., she joined the group of Biophysics of Photosynthesis headed by Roberta Croce at the VU Amsterdam (NL). During her Ph.D., she combined ultrafast spectroscopy with MD simulations to investigate how the light-harvesting complexes of plants and algae activate photoprotection. In 2018 she obtained a prestigious national VENI grant that allowed her to develop a spectroscopic tool to measure how photoactive molecules respond to pH changes. In 2022, N.L. was appointed principal investigator at ICFO, within the elite CELLEX NEST fellow program. Her group develops novel spectroscopic and computational tools to study the functional response of photosynthetic proteins to changes in the microenvironment. In 2022 N. L. was awarded a Postdoc Junior Leader Fellowship from La Caixa foundation to apply her integrated approach to a biodiversity of photosynthetic organisms to understand how they activate photoprotection in different ecological niches.

Lecture: "Photosynthetic proteins in action! Introduction to spectroscopic and computational methods in photosynthesis research"

In the lecture, we will introduce fundamental concepts related to light-harvesting in photosynthetic organisms. Additionally, we will provide an overview of the main spectroscopic techniques and approaches in time-resolved spectroscopy and computational chemistry that are employed by our group to study this subject.

Seminar: "Photosynthetic proteins in action! Towards a real-time investigation of how light-harvesting is regulated in plants"

Plants serve as a natural example of how solar energy can be converted into chemical energy in the presence of oxygen while avoiding photooxidation. It has now been established that plants prevent photooxidation by activating a rapidly inducible and reversible photoprotective mechanism at the level of their light-harvesting complexes. However, the precise activation process of this photoprotective mechanism remains unknown.

In this lecture, the audience will gain insight into the current understanding of:

1. i) How light-harvesting is regulated in plants and, more generally, in oxygenic photosynthetic organisms.
2. ii) The experimental and computational tools under development, particularly by this group, aimed at unraveling the molecular mechanisms governing the activation of photoprotection in photosynthetic organisms.

Understanding both the mechanism and the rate at which plants can activate or deactivate photoprotection will provide answers to a long-standing open question in the fields of biophysics and physical chemistry. This knowledge will also be instrumental in inspiring new studies focused on maximizing plant productivity through the optimization of photoprotective responses—a recent, groundbreaking avenue of research (de Souza et al., Science 2022; Kromdijk et al., Science 2016).

Suggested literature:

Liguori, N., van Stokkum, I., Muzzopappa, F., Kennis, J., Kirilovsky, D., & Croce, R. (2022). The molecular origin of the OCP-dependent non-photochemical quenching mechanism in cyanobacteria. Chemrxiv

Liguori, N., Campos, S. R., Baptista, A. M., & Croce, R. (2019). Molecular anatomy of plant photoprotective switches: the sensitivity of PsbS to the environment, residue by residue. The journal of physical chemistry letters, 10(8), 1737-1742.

Liguori, N., Xu, P., Van Stokkum, I. H., Van Oort, B., Lu, Y., Karcher, D., ... & Croce, R. (2017). Different carotenoid conformations have distinct functions in light-harvesting regulation in plants. Nature communications, 8(1), 1-9. 

Liguori, N., Roy, L. M., Opacic, M., Durand, G., & Croce, R. (2013). Regulation of light harvesting in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii: the C-terminus of LHCSR is the knob of a dimmer switch. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 135(49), 18339-18342.