scaralbi

Hello visitor ! Welcome to scaralbi’s wiki.

Index

What is this ?

This is just my personal site on the web. I use it to store and share information.

Homo liber nulla de re minus quam de morte cogitat; et ejus sapientia non mortis sed vitae meditatio est.
(There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to meditate not on death but on life.)
[SPINOZA’S Ethics, Pt IV, Prop.67]

WhatisLife

What is life if not extracting electrons from something and use them to generate an electrochemical potential across a phase that drives us far, far away from equilibrium? Physical separation of protons though membranes allow this. I like to think that Rothko’s paintings illustrate the electrochemical gradient with different chromatic fields. I see the thick orange lines as the membranes, the top orange field as the cytoplasm and the white space as the lumen full of protons. Illustrated below in the inner membrane with the two separate motors is, of course, the ATP synthase (PDB: 6CP3).

Bio

I am a 23 years old human being. I am particularly excited about synthetic biology, cyanobacteria, and anything that aims to engineer sustainability in our biosphere. I completed my BSc in biotechnology from Imperial College London in 2019. There I took part in iGEM and BIOMOD and thus discovered the synthetic biology revolution. I wrote my final year thesis under the supervision of Robert Endres and became quickly interested in the field of systems biology. For my thesis, I developed a novel biophysical model to simulate spatially heterogeneous microbial communities (aka biofilms) and clarify the so-called “paradox of the plankton”. I am now doing a PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, as part of the BBSRC-DTP programme. Here I evolved a passion for the biophysics of microbial biofilms in the group of Diana Fusco at the Cavendish Laboratories. For my PhD project, I am trying to understand how and why cyanobacteria can produce electricity in the Howe Lab at the Department of Biochemistry .

Disclaimer

This website was created under the terms of the open-source MIT license. Do you want to collaborate in some scientific projects? Do you have any question ? Write to me: as2945@cam.ac.uk.