Roberto Caferri, Edoardo Andrea Cutolo and Roberto Bassi attended the Gordon conference and seminar on Chloroplast Biotechnology held in Lucca from 29/03 to 4/04.

The conference covered the most recent advances in genetic engineering of plastid genomes in plants and algae with contributions from leading experts in the field.

Major trend topics were the development of RNA editing-based techniques to control gene expression in the organelle, synthetic plastid genomes and photosynthesis improvement by means of genetic engineering of the carbon fixation reactions and of light-harvesting processes. Roberto Caferri and Edoardo Andrea Cutolo presented their work during the conference’s seminar with talks discussing ongoing lab projects focussed on the characterization of stress-related light-harvesting proteins and their potential uses for enhancing photosynthetic efficiency and on genetic engineering of microalgal plastids for producing high-value recombinant proteins.

Roberto Bassi presented the laboratory’s research line on the engineering of the spectral properties of light-harvesting systems by tuning the protein environment.

Roberto Caferri was awarded the Best Poster award for his contribution titled: “A Stress-Induced Paralog of Lhcb4 Controls the Photosystem II Functional Architecture in Arabidopsis thaliana”.

Link:

https://www.grc.org/chloroplast-biotechnology-grs-conference/2025/

https://www.grc.org/chloroplast-biotechnology-conference/2025/