Anna Moroni grew up in a family of lawyers, with several extended family members who were researchers in medicine and chemistry. She studied ancient Latin and Greek, and had a passion for acting and painting, but Moroni found herself following her interest in science when it came to her higher education and career. She was encouraged by the fact that the scientific community was so welcoming. “From the beginning I just found that people in science were much nicer, and honestly, I keep on thinking it,” she shares. “Driven by their pure interest in knowing how things work — not in search of money — with a clear view of the fact that humans are just part of the animal kingdom, scientists appeared to me just right.”
She pursued a master’s degree in agronomy, the science of soil management and crop production, at the University of Milan. There she worked with Erasmo Marrè and Jack Dainty, who introduced her to biophysics — both worked on membrane transport in plants. In addition to learning the subject matter from both men, Moroni developed deep connections with them. “Marrè was what we call in Italy a Renaissance man, highly educated in several fields, from science to philosophy, music, and so on. And he was a flamboyant character too, that kind of person that you can spend the entire evening telling anecdotes about,” she says. “Dainty has been a pioneer in in the biophysics of water transport in plants and his character and his scientific approach inspired me a lot. He was the best human being I ever met. Moving from a deprived coal mining background in Yorkshire to the exclusive Cambridge environment, he remained throughout his life a socialist. I had the privilege to become one of his closest friends and to host him for long periods in my lab after his retirement. We published a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper together when he was more than 80.”
Following the completion of her master’s degree, she earned her PhD in cellular and molecular biology at the University of Milan. She studied abroad for six months at the University of Toronto in Eduardo Blumwald’s lab, working on membrane transport, and for a year in Alberto Mancinelli’s lab at Columbia University, studying phytochrome photoconversion. She also took a course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory taught by Gail Robertson and Peter Ruben, which was a turning point for her. “The striking thing about that course for someone like me coming from Italy, was the discovery that teachers encouraged students to try out their ideas by performing experiments,” she shares. “It might sound odd, but in my environment students were not asked — nor allowed — to suggest experiments, which were at that time decided by senior people only.” After her PhD, she worked in a postdoctoral position at the University of Milan, where she cloned human HCN2 channels and discovered viral potassium channels.
Moroni is now a professor of plant physiology at the University of Milan, where she also teaches membrane biophysics. Her current projects are understanding structural-functional correlates in HCN channels and protein engineering for creating synthetic channels with new functional features, such as light- or temperature-gated channels. “We combine structural studies — nowadays cryo-EM — and functional assays (patch clamp primarily), in order to follow dynamic changes during channel activity. With this approach we have identified ways to interfere with channel activity by means of small molecule drugs or interacting peptides,” she explains, “and we could explain the effect of several pathological mutations found in patients. In turn, we use the deep knowledge on mechanisms of gating to engineer synthetic ion channels. For instance, we have created a K+ channel that is activated by light.”
The biggest challenge of her career thus far has been to get a permanent position in academia in spite of her interdisciplinary focus. “In Italy, the borders between scientific disciplines are traditionally kept tight and biophysics is not quite open to biologists. So for me, having a background in plant physiology and working in mammalian ion channels, it has not been easy,” she says. “And I see that for my young collaborators things are not yet easier. I think I was lucky and persistent; some publications in top journals were very helpful too.”
She loves the field of biophysics for its quantitative approach, “and the constant effort of biophysicists to advance the frontiers of both the methodology and analysis,” she says. She hopes to establish biophysics as a subject taught in biology courses in Italy, to help encourage interdisciplinary studies in that country. In pursuit of that goal, she is currently working with others to launch a master’s program in quantitative biology at her university.
Moroni serves on the Biophysical Society’s Council, giving back as a Society leader after receiving support from BPS through her career. She notes that “being selected and/or invited for talks at the Biophysical Society Annual Meetings made the work of the lab visible.” She has also valued the sense of belonging she has gained from Society membership, and the concrete ways in which BPS supports young investigators, “not only in words but also in real terms.” She recommends that students and early career biophysicists “become active in the Biophysical Society, because it creates a community to which you belong.”