SITIA ROBERTO

Roberto Sitia's scientific interests have been centered on the mechanisms that regulate antibody production and protein secretion. Having started with a strictly immunochemical approach, he began in the early 80s to utilize molecular biology techniques to unravel B cell development, and in particular isotype switching and Ig secretion. He contributed significantly in establishing the correlation between Ig gene recombination and accessibility/transcription. In the late 80s, during a sabbatical period in César Milstein's laboratory in Cambridge, he was amongst the firsts to fuse immunology and cell biology: his work contributed significantly to our current understanding of 'quality control' of secretory proteins. He was the first to describe the degradation of proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum. Of remarkable importance are his contributions in characterizing the 'leaderless' secretory pathway, utilized by proteins like bFGF and IL1ß that lack a signal peptide, and on the regulation of redox homeostasis in the endoplasmic reticulum.
He was elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 1992.
Recently, his laboratory has cloned several novel human genes involved in the ‘unfolded protein response’ and partly characterized their structure and functional role.