Beatrice Cobucci-Ponzano

Dr. Beatrice Cobucci-Ponzano is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Biosciences and BioResources (IBBR) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Naples Division. She leads research on enzyme biochemistry, particularly focusing on carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes), glycosidases, and their applications in biorefineries, green chemistry, and human disease therapeutics. She is the National Coordinator for the IBISBA-IT research infrastructure and a member of the steering committee of the Italian Society of Astrobiology.

Her research interests span enzyme structure-function relationships, metagenomics of extreme environments, pharmacological chaperones for lysosomal storage diseases, and translational recoding in Archaea. She investigates extremophilic enzymes for industrial applications and explores the flexibility of the genetic code in relation to the limits of life, contributing to astrobiology. Her work integrates biochemistry, molecular biology, and structural biology.

The most recent publications reflect a strong trend in extremozyme discovery, biorefinery applications, glycosynthase engineering, and structural insights into human enzymes like acid alpha-glucosidase for Pompe disease. Her studies often combine omics technologies with functional characterization to bridge sequence data with biological function.

• Pharmacological Enhancement of α-Glucosidase by the Allosteric Chaperone N-acetylcysteine (2012)
• Structure of human lysosomal acid alpha-glucosidase - a guide for the treatment of Pompe disease (2017)
• Ten years of CAZypedia: a living encyclopedia of carbohydrate-active enzymes (2018)

Dr. Cobucci-Ponzano has been involved in advising through collaborative research and mentoring within funded projects. She has contributed to patents on pharmacological chaperones and has participated in national and EU-funded grants such as IBISBA 1.0, PREP-IBISBA, Bioindustry 4.0, and ITINERIS under the PNRR. Her lab is part of the European Research Infrastructure IBISBA-EU and the national astrobiology network IAI-ASTROBIOLab, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in biotechnology and space life sciences.