Alessandro Bertero

Summary

My group’s long-term mission is to elucidate and then reverse engineer the gene regulatory mechanisms underpinning cardiac development and disease. Our current focus is the role of three-dimensional chromatin organization in normal and abnormal heart development, and in cardiomyopathy. We are also building novel tools to probe the structure-function relationship of chromatin organization, and to perform phenotype-agnostic gene function screenings. Our work mainly relies on genetic engineering with CRISPR/Cas9, differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into 2D and 3D cardiac models, determination of nuclear architecture and function with genomic and imaging assays, and analysis of cardiac physiology.

My earlier contributions have been to elucidate the Melusin-ERK1/2 signalling pathway in cardiac hypertrophy, revealing the epigenetic and epitranscriptional effects of TGFβ-SMAD2/3 signalling during early differentiation of hPSCs, and improving the safety of cardiac remuscularization therapy with stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes.

Bioengineering Bioinformatics Biotechnology Cardiology Cell Biology Developmental Biology Genetics Genomics Molecular Biology Synthetic Biology

Past or current institution affiliations