Olga Corti obtained a BS in biology at the University of Milan and received training in molecular biology at the C. Besta Neurological Institute. During her PhD research in Jacques Mallet’s laboratory in Paris, she developed and evaluated viral vector-based dopamine replacement strategies in Parkinson’s disease pre-clinical models (French Society for Neuroscience PhD Thesis Award, 2000). As a post-doctoral researcher in Alexis Brice’s group at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, she studied mechanisms of cell death linked to loss of Parkin function. She was recruited by Inserm as a senior investigator in 2004 and is currently Inserm Research Director at the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière in Paris. Her team studies the role of Parkinson’s disease-related proteins in mechanisms of mitochondrial quality control and the functional consequence of genetic mutations, using a combination of approaches of molecular and cell biology and biochemistry in complementary models, including primary neurons and glial cells from mouse models, and fibroblasts and induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons from patients.
Recent relevant publications:
- Lesage S, et al, (2016) Loss of VPS13C function in autosomal recessive parkinsonism causes mitochondrial dysfunction and increases PINK1/Parkin-dependent mitophagy. Am J Hum Genet, 98(3), 500-513.
- Gautier CA, et al. (2016) The endoplasmic reticulum-mitochondria interface is perturbed in PARK2 knockout mice and patients with PARK2 mutations. Hum Mol Genet, 25(14), 2972-2984.
- Bertolin G, e al. (2015) Parkin maintains mitochondrial levels of the protective Parkinson’s disease-related enzyme 17-β hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 10. Cell Death Differ. 2015;22(10):1563-76.
- Buhlman L, et al. (2014) Damiano M, et al. Functional interplay between Parkin and Drp1 in mitochondrial fission and clearance. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta mcr. 2014;1843(9):2012-26
- Bertolin G, et al. (2013) The TOMM machinery is a molecular switch in PINK1/PARKIN-dependent mitochondrial clearance. Autophagy 2013;9(11), 1-17.