Science life: my first discovery!

Hi guys! I'm Adriana Della Pietra, a normal girl with a normal life dreamig to become a wonderful girl with a wonderful life (career first of all). I like challenges and i'm trying to put them on my way in order to be satisfied and happy after I have overcome them. But let's introduce me since the beginning...
I was born in Prato, near Florence (Tuscany), I had a sheltered childhood with a perfect family and a lot of friends (one of them is now my best friend) and then, after the school, I decided to begin the university in Florence... But my question was: What can i do, what can i study at university? The choice seems very difficoult at first but it becomes very easy if you choice according to your passion, so i decided biology!
Now I'm graduated with the highest honours at the age of 21 years old: I'm a biologist and I couldn't be more proud of me. This is not the end because, since I had brilliant results during my bachelor degree, i decided to challenge myself and so, now, I'm attending an international master degree in Neuroscience, in Trieste (with english courses and exams). But now I don't want to bore you anymore with my life stuffs and I'd like to tell you about my first scientific discovery that I did during my thesis period!

The Cerato-platanin, a fungal elicitor, shows antioxidant activity on cultured macrophages.

The Cerato-platanin (CP) is a small protein of about 12.4KDa, a little bit hydrofobic, identified in the cell wall and in the filtered culture of the Ceratocystis platani fungus. The CP is the leader of a new protein family, the CP family, with more than 130 sequences. It has a 3D structure with the double-psibeta-barrel domain, similar to one of the expansin domains. Exactly as the expansines do, also CP can link the chitin and its derivates and it is also able to "relax" the cellulose structure. CP is a MAMP (Microbe Associated Molecular Pattern), so it activates primary defense cascades of hosts plants and not. We have the MAMP activity after the activation of signalin cascades in which we have the interaction of CP with the PRR receptors, identified on the plants and structurally related to the animals Toll-like receptors.
At the department of experimental and clinical biomedical sciences, scintists (me too for a period of time) are analyzing the effects of CP on animals cells, in particular on murine macrophages RAW264.7. These studies have shown, at the beginning, that CP hasn't a cytotoxic effect on these cells and it is able to induce a decrease in the production of ROS in unstressed macrophages.
In this thesis, I performed a deepening analysis of the antioxindant effect of the CP and also an additional study about a possible anti-inflammatory effect of the CP on the same cells. The ROS production was recorded on pretreated cells for 1h with CP and then stressed with LPS or H2O2. A dye has been used to recors the ROS levels and we used ascorbate as negative control. In both the cases, CP is able to reduce the ROS concentration to reach levels very similar to the negative control. Indeed, the anti-inflammatory activity has been recorded on cells treated with LPS, following (with western-blot techniques) the expression of AKT, COX-2, NFKB and its inhibitor IKB, molecules involved in different levels of the inflammatory cascade. The use of specific anti-AKT antibodies has allowed to see how can CP reduce the AKT activation. Since AKT is involved in a lot of different signaling cascades, we decided to study the expression of COX-2 with higher specificity for the inflammatory signaling. Also in these experiments, the COX levels decrease as in the negative control with acetylsalicylic acid. Actually, sudies are in progress about the expression of NFKB and IKB in order to record another important variable of the inflammatory signaling. The results of these experiments are encouraging but, of course, we need further tests.
Anyway, my thesis allowed to confirm the anioxidant activity of CP and to start the definition of its encouraging anti-inflammatory activity.
(University of Florence; candidate: Dr.ssa Adriana Della Pietra - supervisor: Prof.ssa Luigia Pazzagli - correlator: Dr. Simone Luti)

Thank you for your attention. I hope to become soon part of this wonderful community. Bye Bye... see you soon!!!