Nicoletta Murciano

How to get to know this grant

During my Master's Degree I did an Erasmus traineeship in the University of Portsmouth in UK. This was a great experience and it was a really stimulating and challenging environment. This made my decision to work abroad for my future career of researcher. After graduation I had a year of internship in a laboratory of electrophysiology in Florence that allowed me to obtain skills in the manual patch clamp technique. I was immediately interested in the topic and experimental technique.  I looked for a PhD in electrophysiology field and I found the advertisement for a PhD position in the Evidence project. I felt that my skill and mind set were ideally suited to the position. I also think the purpose of this project can lead to relevant changes in public health, and I really want to be part of it.

Reason for joining

I've started the first year on 1^st March 2020. The objective of EVIDENCE is to use novel technologies and approaches developed based on the gain of knowledge by the members of the consortium to improve public health, develop new diagnostic methods for common and rare forms of anaemia and enable quality control for personalised treatment of these groups of patients. In particular my PhD project is based on the screening of cells by automated electrophysiology for ion channel alterations as a possible cause of channelopathies. The aim is to extend automated patch-clamp approach for RBCs to all known ion channels expressed in RBC membranes. My contributions may lead to a new, direct functional analysis to diagnose RBC membrane physiology in health and disease states as well as to characterize artificial RBC at different stages in comparison to native RBCs.

Expectations

I am working as a PhD student in the Nanion Technologies Company in Munich. Nanion has grown to one of the most respected automated patch clamp providers worldwide. The mission of the company is to provide innovative, high performance instrumentation that enable scientists and researchers to analyze ion channels.  Working in this company allows me to have all the tools available to carry out my research in the field of red blood cells. I really appreciate innovative research with modern techniques and constantly updates.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus has currently blocked most of the opportunities of collaboration with other consortium partners. I had the opportunity to meet all the members in the Kick-off meeting in Amsterdam. It was a really rewarding experience; it was clear that during the previous project, RELEVANCE, they all collaborated to the best to obtain excellent results. Seeing what kind of synergy within all those people made me immediately want to be part of it. In my company I am part of a very functional and collaborative team. I always share my ideas or experiments results with my colleagues and I always had a great and stimulating feedback from them. I hope that soon we would go back to a normal situation in Europe and start to collaborate to the others PhD students in EVIDENCE project with the goal to create a functional European team.

To carry out my research in EVIDENCE programme means to have multifaceted education. It is an objective of EVIDENCE to educate the next generation of creative, entrepreneurial and innovative early-stage researchers, boost our career perspectives and increase our employability in both the academic and non-academic sectors. This will be achieved through international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral mobility and training, and will optimally prepare me for all future challenges of my selected career path.  I will receive and access, will encompass the unique diverse array of skills practiced by the members of consortium, and facilitate the application of this trans-disciplinary knowledge for development of novel diagnostic tools, approaches and techniques to reach the project's goals.

Updates

I am the ESR number 12. I have been enrolled as PHD student in the company Nanion technologies in Munich and the University of Saarland in Homburg, two of the partners of the Innovative Training Network (ITN) EVIDENCE. It's been two years since I started my PHD and I'm very happy with my experience so far. My PhD project is based on the screening of cells by automated electrophysiology for ion channel alterations as a possible cause of channelopathies. The aim is to extend automated patch-clamp approach for RBCs to all known ion channels expressed in RBC membranes. My contributions may lead to a new, direct functional analysis to diagnose RBC membrane physiology in health and disease states as well as to characterize artificial RBC at different stages in comparison to native RBCs. Thanks to the innovative and high-performance instrumentation provided by my company it was possible to establish functional assays for the characterization of channels such as Piezo1, Gardos channels and others involved in diseases such as sickle cell anemia or hereditary xerocytosis. It has already been possible to use these assays developed by me on healthy and diseased red blood cells with unknown mutation of Piezo1 and Gardos channels.

I am doing mainly my work in a non-academic environment but thanks to the secondments provided by the ITN program it was possible to work in laboratories in an academic sector such as the University of Saarland with Lars Kaestner and the CNRS of Roscoff with Stephane Egée. Through these experiences I was able to learn new laboratory techniques that cannot be performed in my company. I also had the opportunity to work with experts of the field and to work with other ESRs. It was very useful not only on a professional level but also on a social level. Due to pandemic situation most of connection such as in person meetings and secondments did not take place so I found very useful the secondment experience. I would say that my expectation from this ITN program were met so far. The aim of this kind of ITN is to train a new generation of creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative early-stage researchers and I´ve started to feel that i can fit in this position. I feel I have improved and learned new skills as a scientist in various aspects, organization of experiments and scientific knowledge but also in terms of organization of time to deal with different tasks. Thanks to periodic meetings it was possible to improve my skills in the talks and presentations, in the writing of papers or posters. It is also possible to request to ITN organization any kind of training I need. I think it is very functional to create this network with other young researchers. We all want to continue to do research and I hope in the future to be able to create collaborations with all the other ESRs. Last but not least I would also like to say that the salary covers all my needs both in terms of scientific material necessary for research and in terms of monthly private expenses. I would fully recommend taking this path to future students who intend to do so.