Biography
Prof. Dr. Roberta Croce studied chemistry at the University of Padova and completed her Ph.D. in Plant Biology/Biophysics at the University of Milano in 1998. After two postdoc periods in Germany (MPI Mulheim a.d. Rurh) and Italy (University of Verona), she got a permanent position at the Institute of Biophysics of the CNR first in Milan and then in Trento. In 2005 she moved to the Netherlands at Wageningen University with a visitor fellowship and in 2006 she got a tenure track assistant professor position (Rosalind Franklin fellowship) at the University of Groningen where she became associate professor in 2008. Since 2011 she is Professor of Biophysics of Photosynthesis and head of the group at the Department of Physics of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. She is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Royal Holland Society of Science and Humanity (KHMW). She is also a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science and the Plant Cell, and the recipient of several personal research grants. She has published more than 180 scientific articles on the topic of photosynthesis. She is currently the elected president of the International Society of Photosynthesis.
Research description
The main interest of my group is to understand the molecular bases of photosynthesis to extract the building principles of the light-to-energy conversion machinery and to use them to improve photosynthesis efficiency in algae and crops. We analyze the photosynthetic apparatus, focusing especially on the light reactions, at different levels of complexity, from a single molecule to the whole organism, which can be a bacterial or an algal photosynthetic cell or a plant. Our research has a high multidisciplinary character and includes genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, plant physiology, spectroscopy and theoretical approaches (e.g. molecular dynamics, ab initio methods).
Selected publications (2019-2022)
- Tian L, WJ Nawrocki, X Liu, I Polukhina, IHM van Stokkum, R Croce (2019) “pH dependence, kinetics and light-harvesting regulation of non-photochemical quenching in Chlamydomonas” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (17), 8320-8325
- Mascoli V, N.Liguori, Penqi Xu, Laura M. Roy, IHM van Stokkum, R. Croce (2019) “Capturing the quenching mechanism of light-harvesting complexes of plants by zooming in on the ensemble” Chem, 5 (11), 2900-2912
- Nicol L WJ Nawrocki, R Croce (2019) “Disentangling the sites of non-photochemical quenching in vascular plants” Nature Plants, 5 (11), 1177-1183.
- Xu P, V. U. Chukhutsina, W. J. Nawrocki, G. Schansker, L. W. Bielczynski, Y. Lu, D. Karcher, R. Bock and R. Croce (2020) Photosynthesis without β-carotene. eLife, 9, e58984.
- Tros M, V Mascoli, G Shen, M-Y Ho, L Bersanini, CJ Gisriel, DA Bryant, R Croce (2021) Breaking the Red Limit: Efficient Trapping of Long-Wavelength Excitations in Chlorophyll-f-Containing Photosystem I. Chem, 7 (1), 155-173
- Chukhutsina, V.U., Liu, X., Xu, P., Croce, R. (2020) Light-harvesting complex II is an antenna of photosystem I in dark-adapted plants. Nature Plants, 6, 860–868
- Mascoli V, Bersanini L and Croce R (2020) Far-red absorption and light-use efficiency trade-offs in chlorophyll f photosynthesis. Nature Plants, 6, 1044–1053
For the complete list see: Prof. Dr. Roberta Croce Google Scholar