MARCO BONIZZONI

 

 

I was born 28 years ago in Pavia, a nice small town in northern Italy, where I grew up and spent most of my life.

I enrolled in Chemistry at the University of Pavia and during my last year I was accepted in Prof. Luigi Fabbrizzi’s lab for undergraduate work. In 2001/2002 I spent a term working in Prof. F.P. Schmidtchen’s lab at the Technische Universitat Munchen (Munich, Germany), learning the basics of handling phosphines and large amounts of beer. In 2003 I graduated magna cum laude with a thesis on the metal binding properties of open-chain and cyclic ligands containing a piperazine moiety.

I then pursued a Ph.D. in the same lab, under the guidance of Prof. Fabbrizzi and in collaboration with Dr. Angelo Taglietti. I was introduced to the exciting field of anion recognition and sensing and I tried my hand at a lot of things, some of which, to my surprise and delight, were deemed acceptable for publication. I obtained my doctoral degree in January 2007 with a dissertation entitled Anion recognition through metal-ligand and hydrogen bonding interactions.

By then I had taken up a generous offer from Dr. Anslyn to join his group at the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral fellow and proceeded to cross the Pond at the beginning of February 2007.

Here at UT I will be involved in the design and development of a library of small-molecule ATP-competitive protein kinase inhibitors based on the 2,6,9-trisubstituted purine scaffold, also in collaboration with Dr. K. Dalby (College of Pharmacy). The library will be prepared on a solid support, through a directed parallel synthesis approach.

Once cleaved from the support, the compounds prepared will be used in enzyme characterization studies that will be conducted in Dr. Dalby’s group. In addition to that, for our purposes the library components will be further functionalized with a suitable fluorophore and organized in a sensing array. The interaction with selected protein kinases will then be investigated by fluorescence polarization measurements, thus providing the basis for what we hope will be a system for the discrimination of kinase enzymes based on pattern recognition, as popularized by recent research in this group.